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.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on Forgiveness)

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs." ― English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

In her classic novel, Charlotte Bronte puts these words in the mouth of Helen Burns, a fellow student of Jane's at the abusive Lowood School, who not only stands for loyalty and friendship, but also the possibilities of Christianity for patience, acceptance and tolerance.

Those were excellent qualities to emulate in Bronte’s turbulent early Victorian Era, and they remain so in our equally disruptive if faster-passed time.

(The image accompanying this post shows a very young Elizabeth Taylor as Helen in the 1944 Hollywood adaptation of Jane Eyre.)

Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on Not Holding Grudges)

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs…. No; I cannot believe that: I hold another creed: which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end." — English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

These words are spoken in the novel by Jane Eyre’s doomed but serene childhood friend, Helen Burns—played, in the 1943 screen adaptation, by 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (on the right in the attached image, with Peggy Ann Garner as the young Jane Eyre).

Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on ‘Hidden Treasures’ of the Human Heart)

“The human heart has hidden treasures, 

  In secret kept, in silence sealed; 

The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, 

  Whose charms were broken if revealed.”—English novelist-poet Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855), “Evening Solace,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (aka Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte) (1846)

Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on Why ‘Self-Righteousness is Not Religion’)

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.” ― English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on Prejudices and Education)

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks." ― English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

The Bronte Bicentennial: Celebrating a Romantic Rebel

Young writers are continually told to “write what you know.” Novelist Charlotte Bronte—born 200 years ago this week in England—seems to have learned the lesson on her own without hearing the advice from anyone else. She certainly left enough clues in her fiction of an intense identification with her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre.

It started with the very name of the place the young governess comes to work: Thornfield Hall. Although critics have noted the religious symbolism of the estate’s name (the “thorns and thistles” inflected by God as Adam’s punishment for sin, Christ’s “crown of thorns” to expiate it), its also echoes Bronte’s birthplace: Thornton, in Yorkshire.

Jane’s work as a teacher and governess was even more strongly rooted in Charlotte’s experience. You can practically hear the voice of the character in her author’s complaint that a governess “is not considered as a living and rational being.”

Moreover, the novel’s atmosphere of madness, deprivation and death could not have been communicated so vividly except by someone all too familiar with these elements in her own household. The madness was supplied by younger brother Branwell, who grew into a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict. The deprivation came from her family’s shabby gentility, a condition resulting from her father’s status as a country curate of modest means. Death was the ever-present, unshakable companion of her family: Charlotte’s mother died when the girl was five; her two older sisters died within a month of each other when Charlotte was only nine; and Branwell and her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, died within nine months by the time she reached her early thirties. Charlotte, who lived the longest of the children, died at age 37, succumbing to complications from childbirth.

All the more striking, then, that with such limited time, Charlotte, Emily and Anne produced such striking—and deeply individual—works. (See my prior post on how the trio adopted male pseudonyms—Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, respectively—to circumvent the sexist book reviewers of her time.)

Jane Eyre is both wish-fulfillment fantasy and cri de couer, a novel of romance and rebellion. At the same time it encouraged female readers with its vision of a heroine easily the intellectual match of any male, it presented a magnetic but troubled hero who could have been cast from the same mold as Lord Byron: i.e., “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in Lady Caroline Lamb’s famous phrase about the poet.

Despite herself, Jane is drawn to the mysterious, remote Rochester and is absolutely sure, despite his cynicism, black moods and injunction to go nowhere near the attic, that he is the man for her. Bronte was working within a template, created in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, of a young woman who ends up reforming a problematic, elusive male. Well into the 20^th and 21^st centuries, female readers and viewers continued to see dashing, darkly handsome males (e.g., Rhett Butler, Mr. Big of Sex and the City) and glimpse The Husband Within.

I am absolutely convinced that, had Mel Gibson’s adman really wanted to figure out What Women Want, he could have done a focus group of the devoted readers of Charlotte Bronte’s classic and determined the answer with far fewer complications than in the film.  

At the same time it expresses full desire for a deep, body-and-soul love (Jane turns down a proposal from the upright but bloodless minister St. John Rivers but marries her tormented but passionate employer), the novel insists on dignity and autonomy, both for mistreated girls and women exploited in the service of affluent families. As Bronte’s recent biographer Claire Harman noted in an article in this past weekend’s Financial Times, the novel profoundly disturbed the Victorian political and literary establishment with its bitter denunciations of class distinctions.

Charles Dickens had already rocked that establishment to the core with Oliver Twist, one of the first—perhaps even the first—novels with a child as the main character. But Charlotte Bronte did two things that even Dickens, venturesome as he was, hadn’t thought of: she made the orphan a female and wrote the novel in the orphan's own voice. (Six years later, Dickens adopted Bronte’s innovations in Bleak House, but most readers would agree that, despite its deserved high status in British literature, his heroine, Esther Summerson, is no match for Jane’s vibrancy.)

Jane Eyre may endure for the simplest of reasons: it grabs the reader by the neck on its first pages and never lets go. It effortlessly fuses setting (a raw winter day at the emotionally cold home of Jane’s guardian, Mrs. Reed), characterization (Jane’s “consciousness of my physical inferiority” to Mrs. Reed’ children), and action (her withdrawal to the library, then Mrs. Reed’s punishment: confining her to “the red room”).  From the start, she is an underdog whom we want to win. By the end, Charlotte Bronte convinces us that she deserves to, as well.

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