This Day in Literary History (Death of Anne Bronte, The Forgotten, Underrated Sister)

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.

This Day in Literary History (‘Wuthering Heights’ Author Emily Bronte Dies of TB)

Dec. 19, 1848— Only a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, the single novel that assured her literary immortality, Emily Bronte died at age 30 in her family’s Yorkshire parsonage of tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken her older and troubled brother Branwell only three months before.

To my knowledge, there has never been a set of talented creative siblings quite like the Brontes. The closest might be the Jameses—philosopher William, novelist Henry, and diarist Alice. But the three Jameses managed to survive well into middle age, enabling them to achieve a prolific output even individually.

In contrast, Emily—along with older sister Charlotte, younger sister Anne, and even Bramwell—died while still young; and the melodramatic plots and Gothic settings of their works—what biographer Juliet Barker calls “Wild Genius on the Moors,” and what contemporaries often labeled “coarse”—could not be more removed from the refined intellectual, urban content of the Americans.

One aspect of Wuthering Heights that especially fascinates me is how, even with its complex, multi-generational plot, it still leaves space on important matters that has invited considerable speculation.

(For instance, who were the orphaned Heathcliff’s parents when Mr. Earnshaw discovers him on the streets of Liverpool? And what was Heathcliff doing in the years away from Wuthering Heights that enabled him to become rich and return to wreak vengeance?)

In the same way, Emily, perhaps the least documented of the three writing Bronte sisters (two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, also died of TB in 1825), also had gaping holes in her history that biographers sought to fill—with perhaps even more speculation than has revolved around Heathcliff.

Most of what we know about Emily came via Charlotte, either directly (in her "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell," two pseudonyms adopted by Emily and Anne to circumvent sexist publishers and book reviewers of the time) or indirectly (novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte relied heavily on her friend’s reminiscences about her sister).

At the time, Emily had endured fierce criticism from critics (e.g., “The reader is … disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”).

Charlotte, desiring to protect the posthumous memory of the younger sister she loved, depicted her, in a preface she wrote for Wuthering Heights after Emily’s death, as a homebody who preferred seclusion, and thus “had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.”

Recent scholars, like Juliet Barker in her epic biography of the family, have pushed back against such well-intentioned but one-dimensional portrayals. Some have theorized that Charlotte, not content with creating a genteel image for Emily, may have taken matters a step further and burned a manuscript that was intended to be Emily’s follow-up to Wuthering Heights.

(Emily’s publisher wrote her at one point to agree that she shouldn’t send her the manuscript for her second novel until she was satisfied with it. But the manuscript has never been found after Emily’s death.)

Charlotte might have been the driving force in the publication of the sisters’ work, and, as I wrote in a prior post, she certainly upended Victorians’ notions of what women could do with Jane Eyre.

But Emily’s genius is no less astonishing. As vivid and evocative as the film adaptations (1939, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; 1970, starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall) of Wuthering Heights are, they don’t prepare viewers when they encounter the novel for the first time.

Only full exposure to the source material enables one to see how dexterously Emily Bronte handled its plot, setting, and the flawed, selfish soulmates Heathcliff and Cathy who form its passionate center.

In addition, 175 years after the death of its author, contemporary readers are likely to be more aware of themes that have become even more relevant since the novel’s original publication, including inequality, domestic abuse, social constraints versus the freedom of nature, and the agony of displacement.

(The image accompanying this post comes, if you haven’t guessed it already, from William Wyler’s classic adaptation of the story, showing Laurence Olivier’s tormented Heathcliff visiting Merle Oberon’s Cathy at her deathbed.)

This Day in Literary History (Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ Published)

October 19, 1847—The eponymous heroine of the book published by the British firm Smith, Elder and Co., Jane Eyre, made her way through a world riven by class and gender distinctions through open, full-throated defiance of her brutal aunt-guardian and brooding employer. But the author, 31-year-old Charlotte Bronte, sought to do so through subtler means.

Like her protagonist, Bronte saw books as a source of stimulation, even as a means of refashioning her identity. She had convinced sisters Emily and Anne to send their novels together to publishers, using pseudonyms. While their non de plumes held the keys to their respective identities through the first initials, their gender-neutral names (Currier Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell) would allow them, they hoped, to get more open-minded receptions from prospective publishers, critics and readers.

The ruse worked. At first, only the manuscripts by Emily and Anne (Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, respectively) were accepted for publication. But Charlotte received such an encouraging rejection letter concerning hers, The Professor, that, she later recalled, “it cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance letter.” Within weeks, she had submitted another manuscript, Jane Eyre, which was read with mounting excitement by one editor after another at the firm.

For months, Charlotte maintained her alternate identity in dealing with Smith, Elder. (Even messages from “Currer Bell” that all mail to “him” should be addressed instead to “Charlotte Bronte” does not appear to have aroused suspicions.) In fact, it would not be until July 1848 that Charlotte and Anne traveled by train to the firm’s London offices and revealed their identities, in order to demonstrate that, contrary to rumor, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were not one (male) person, but three females.

Smith, Elder released the book with the subtitle “An Autobiography,” harking back to an early marketing ploy used for Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in which readers’ identification with fiction was increased by the suggestion that the book came from a real person. In more ways than Smith, Elder ever suspected when it accepted the novel, however, it was heavily autobiographical. Though she and her sisters were still at home with their father, Charlotte had, like her heroine, grown up motherless before becoming a governess. Like her character, she had few real advantages: no money and, because of her stunted growth and poor skin, little in the way of looks. And the author even gave her middle name to her creation.

What she did have, from early on, was a powerful love for literature. Books enabled poor, plain Charlotte Bronte, like poor, plain Jane Eyre, to discover herself, to realize her true identity.

Readers encountering Bronte’s horrific descriptions of being locked in the “red room” at Gateshead, the home of her aunt, and of surviving a starvation diet at the charity school Lowood are likely to associate Bronte with Charles Dickens and his similar fiction about the travails of orphans. But perhaps a more intriguing comparison might be drawn with Henry James’ short novel, Washington Square (1880).

Both novels are, at heart, about the struggle for female autonomy. The death of a parent leaves James’ heroine, Catherine Sloper, like Jane Eyre, at the mercy of a well-educated professional whose most notable personal characteristic is cruelty. (Jane contends at Lowood against the Rev. Brocklehurst, while Catherine deals with her father, who ends up directing his own self-disgust for botching his wife’s pregnancy at his innocent daughter.) In adulthood, Jane and Catherine deal with predatory men who want to exploit them sexually. (Edward Rochester simply wants his way with Jane, while Morris Townsend is a fortune hunter who dupes Catherine into falling in love with him.)

The difference between the two female protagonists arises from the life of the mind. Catherine’s identity is shaped by her fortune (hence, the title of the play and film derived from the novel, The Heiress); Jane’s, on the other hand, derives from books. Not only Jane's intellect, but her sense of fairness and justice derives from her reading. When her aunt's son, 14-year-old schoolboy John Reid, tries to bully her from reading any of the family's books, it represents an attack on the only sustenance the penniless, loveless little girl has. Her accusation--that he is as cruel as the Roman emperors--might derive from her reading of an Oliver Goldsmith history, but it gives her a sense of the confidence she'll need as a young woman in standing up to Edward Rochester. 

Someone could write a fascinating, though admittedly quite idiosyncratic, book simply by reading all the books to which Jane alludes in her narrative: not just the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, but also Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Bunyan, Swift, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Pope, Cowper, and Robert Burns (whose surname perhaps inspired the one given to Jane’s consumptive schoolmate, Helen Burns).

Catherine Sloper survives the soul-searing sarcasm of her father and the callousness of her suitor, but her achievement of selfhood comes from acts of negation—i.e., saying no to the two men who deeply hurt her—rather than from happiness. In contrast, Jane, through her love of books, gains a friend (Helen) and a mentor (Lowood’s headmistress, Miss Temple) whose example light her way even after they pass from her life. In fighting for the right to self-improvement represented by books, Jane becomes “heir” as well as “Eyre” to the best of civilization and the best of herself.

(Portrait of Charlotte Bronte ca. 1839 by J. H. Thompson)