May 28, 1849— Anne Bronte, the youngest,
quietest, and most religious of a trio of sisters who mined extraordinary
fiction from the wild Yorkshire moors where they grew up, passed away from
tuberculosis at age 29 in the seaside town of Scarborough, where she had begged
to be taken for a last visit before she died.
The adjectives I used in the last sentence might
conjure up a weepy, weak, wren-like woman accustomed to taking a back seat to
sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights).
That
image is reinforced by Anne’s physical appearance: a “long neck, thin features
and pronounced mouth,” writes Bronte family biographer Juliet Barker.
But Anne was also the most bitingly satirical of the
three sisters, and the one most unafraid to challenge Victorian mores about
what constituted suitable fiction for women and children—so much so that after
her death, Charlotte and early biographers did her an inadvertent disservice by
softening her sharp edges.
Partly as a result, family biographers and critics
didn’t plumb Anne’s life for clues to themes and characters in her poetry and
two surviving novels. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has only had
one TV adaptation, the 1996 BBC miniseries with Tara Fitzgerald in the title
role, and Agnes Grey has had no TV or film versions at all—unlike
for Jane Eyre (9) and Wuthering Heights (12, counting modern and
Spanish-language versions).
Like Charlotte, Barker wrote in her epic 1994
biography, The Brontes, Anne had “a core of steel, a sense of
duty and obligation,” which manifested itself in making the best of her time
away in school, despite rampant homesickness; in how she looked after her parson
father; in how she worked as a governess for five years, despite her growing
dissatisfaction with the profession; and in an ironclad commitment to writing
that was so intense, Charlotte worried, that she dreaded for her sister’s
health.
Biographers face an unusual problem with the Brontes,
for none more so than Anne. It is impossible to understand how they came to write
at all without understanding their interactions.
But too much stress on that environment can also lead
to a failure to understand the sisters’ differences from each other, as well as
from their equally talented but troubled artist brother Branwell.
It was Branwell, for instance, who created one of the
few likenesses of the three sisters together. (Emily—and Branwell--preceded
Anne in death only months before.) But it was Branwell who seems to have
brought Anne’s second job as a governess to an end when, as tutor to a son in the
Robinson family, he engaged in a scandalous affair that led to his dismissal.
Branwell’s alcohol- and opium-spurred downward spiral when
he went home, in turn, likely inspired Anne’s characterization of Arthur
Huntingdon of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whose alcoholic rages lead his
wife to flee under an assumed name with her child to a remote village.
The novel’s description of the suffering caused by
alcoholism (“I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being
miserable one-half his days and mad the other”) has the special insight of one
who has watched a loved one undone by the disease.
Anne’s relationship with
Charlotte, though not as troubled, was equally complicated.
Though it was Charlotte’s
idea, for instance, to publish her and her sisters’ poems together, Emily and
Anne compelled her to adopt pseudonyms to protect their identities.
Eventually, Charlotte saw
the wisdom of the sisters’ not using female names, because “authoresses are
liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use
for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a
flattery which is not true praise.”
These pseudonyms—Acton,
Ellis, and Currer Bell—feature gender-neutral first names, with the initials of
the three authors corresponding to their actual names.
But it was other
circumstances surrounding the publication of their books involving Charlotte
that led the oldest sister to leave Anne as something of a cipher in the
brooding family saga.
As Samantha Ellis’
January 2017 essay in the British paper The Guardian outlined, Anne
had written a novel about her experiences as a governess, Agnes Grey, first.
But it was Jane Eyre that was seen by British readers first, because,
separate from Emily and Anne, Charlotte found a publisher more enthusiastic
about issuing her book.
In addition, Anne’s
challenge to conventional mores in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall led Charlotte
to be overprotective of her sister’s image after her death.
It would have been bad
enough that Anne, in defiance of the Anglican Church, opposed the idea of
eternal damnation in favor of universal salvation.
But she also raised
hackles with her depictions of a single woman (Huntingdon’s wife, adopting the
name “Mrs. Helen Graham” in her new community) earning a living through her paintings,
of domestic violence, and of the precarious legal position of women in
Victorian England.
While Jane Eyre
and Wuthering Heights ultimately belong to romantic fiction with their
raging but suffering chief male characters, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is
unsparing in its realism.
When contemporary critics took issue with this
treatment, Anne responded, in a preface to the second edition of the book, with
a ringing defense of gritty, unillusioned fiction that doesn’t cater to readers’
expectations:
“To represent a bad thing
in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a
writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it
better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of like to the young and thoughtless
traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there
were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’
when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of
both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”
Anne also echoed John
Milton’s denunciation of “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” in having her
heroine directly challenge society’s encouragement of domineering boys while girls
are supposed to be meek and mild:
“I would not send a poor
girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that
beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect
and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.”
Anne’s death following months
of depression over the death of Emily and her own ineffective medical treatment
for tuberculosis left her posthumous reputation in the hands of Charlotte, who
did not authorize a reissue of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the remaining
six years or her life—and who described her as a “gentle, retiring,
inexperienced writer.”
That overprotectiveness led critics and English professors to overlook a writer with a contribution
to literature every bit as distinct as her older sisters.