Until I found myself holding Anne Brontë’s last letter in my hands, I thought I knew all I needed to know about her. I thought she was a virginal Victorian spinster, sweet and stoic, selfless and sexless, achieving very little before wasting away at twenty-nine. Emily had always been my top Brontë. I’d come to appreciate Charlotte’s toughness and spirit. I’d sometimes thought it might be fun to have a drink with Branwell. But Anne had always seemed a bit, well, boring. Gentle. Pious. Meek. The less talented Brontë, the one in her sisters’ shadow, the other Brontë.
I’m in Yorkshire, giving a reading from my last book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre. While I’m here, Ann Dinsdale, the collections manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, offers to show me some Brontë treasures – and no Brontë fan could refuse.
It’s my first time meeting Ann Dinsdale but I have often seen her on TV; every time there’s some new Brontë discovery, she appears, white-gloved, dressed in black, with a fierce dark bob and a slash of red lipstick. It’s a blowy May morning and the Parsonage is empty except for us; this is the lull before it opens to the public.
Ann leads me through the kitchen, which is kept as if the Brontës have just popped out for a moment. A book leans against an old-fashioned set of scales, the black range gleams like it has just been polished, tea towels have been hung up as if to dry and a red tea cosy sits ready to warm a pot. Undoing the cordon, careful not to set off the alarms, Ann opens a heavy wooden door, and then we are in the annexe added after the Brontës’ time, which is now the library, lined with glass-fronted, floor-to-ceiling bookcases in dark wood, full of everything you ever wanted to know about the Brontës and quite a lot you didn’t. There are three desks squashed up by the windows, which look out onto the moors, rain spattering the glass, sheep shivering. A yellowing newspaper clipping taped to a filing cabinet reads, ‘In Austen, sex is just a kiss on the hand. In the Brontës, everything happens.’ I assume it refers to Wuthering Heights, but Ann says, no, it is about Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Then, as I sit at the long table, and put on latex gloves, she asks if I want to see Anne’s last letter. I’m more interested in looking at some of the other treasures – Emily’s drawing of a fist smashing a mullioned window (whose fist? whose window?), and the book Charlotte and Branwell made, on scraps of paper and sugar bags, in writing tiny enough for their toy soldiers to read – but when I actually read Anne’s letter, I get a shock.
I had read a lot about Anne’s death, more than about her life. The accounts of it ooze high-Victorian sentiment. As a death scene it has everything: a virtuous heroine, piteous coughing, heartfelt prayer, sledgehammers of pathos and mawkish hints of a glorious ascent to heaven. In the books I’d read, poor consumptive Anne slipped out of life on a couch in Scarborough in May 1849, as Charlotte wept beside her. They both knew she was Going To A Better Place, and although she was only twenty-nine, she was ready, because, as Charlotte said, ‘Anne, from her childhood, seemed preparing for an early death.’
Anne’s death was quiet, like a death Charles Dickens had imagined eight years earlier. In The Old Curiosity Shop, his heroine, Little Nell, dies in silence. Not just any silence: ‘Angel hands have strewn the ground deep with snow, that the lightest footstep may be lighter yet; and the very birds are dead, that they may not wake her.’ Yes, that’s right: birds have been killed, or maybe sacrificed themselves, or died of broken hearts, so Nell can die in perfect quietness. ‘She was dead,’ Dickens intones, again and again, his noisy grief eclipsing his dull, wan heroine. Nell is almost an angel herself. So is another dying Victorian heroine; in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 weepie, Little Women, Beth’s sister can see, just by looking at her, that ‘the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribable pathetic beauty’.
Alcott felt very connected to the Brontës. She also had a father with strong beliefs (hers was a transcendental philosopher who almost killed his family by making them live on a vegan commune which didn’t use ‘noxious’ manure or oppress animals by making them plough the fields). She also grew up poor and burned to write. She was also intensely close to her siblings. In 1857, while her sister was dying, Alcott devoured Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë and wrote in her diary, ‘Wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles.’ When she wrote her ‘story and struggles’ into Little Women, she cast herself as conflicted, clever Jo while Beth was a mix of her own sister and Anne Brontë, as she came over in Gaskell’s book; a sweet, passive girl who never dreams of the future or makes plans because she is convinced she was never intended to live long. She’s so resigned and insipid that she is hard to like.
Reading Anne’s last letter, I feel Alcott has got her wrong, and Gaskell too, and maybe even Charlotte. It’s like meeting a completely different woman.
Anne wrote the letter five weeks before her death, on 5 April 1849. The paper is bordered in black because Anne was in mourning for Branwell and Emily, who had died seven and four months before respectively. The letter is cross-written. To save paper, and postage, after writing each page, Anne turned it ninety degrees and wrote over (‘crossed’) the words she had written already. It took skill to cross-write; you had to space out the first lines so that the crossed lines could fit into the spaces between words. You had to be achingly neat. Although Anne was very ill, and weak, her writing is elegant, slanted and clear. The letter was a physical effort to write, and it took courage too, because it was an act of defiance. Anne was writing to ask Charlotte’s lifelong friend Ellen Nussey to go to Scarborough with her, a place she loved, in the hope that it would cure her tuberculosis. Nussey was up for it, but Charlotte had written behind Anne’s back, to tell her to refuse. Charlotte didn’t think Anne was well enough to travel, she didn’t think the cure would work, and maybe in the back of her mind, too, was her idea that Anne was preparing for an early death. But in Anne’s letter, she is full of hope and spirit. She wants to live, because ‘I long to do some good in the world … before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.
As the Parsonage opens for business, I go back through the cordons, eavesdropping on visitors chatting about the Brontës, and no one mentions Anne, and then I’m in the shop, among the fridge magnets and the mugs, and then I’m slip-sliding down the wet cobbled lane, and I’m choking back tears, because Anne didn’t want to die. Of course she didn’t.
I remember how in her phenomenal group biography The Brontës, Juliet Barker said Anne had ‘a core of steel’. Most of the volunteers at the Brontë Parsonage, passionate Brontë fans who spend their days among the Brontës’ intimate objects (Charlotte’s darned stockings, Emily’s paper knife, Branwell’s walking stick) and call them all by first names (even the servants, even the hangers-on), say Anne is their favourite. So as I try to get a hold on myself, I wonder why she is ignored, or written off as boring? Why isn’t she read as much as her sisters? Why was her work suppressed, why is it underrated even now, and what does that say about what women still are and aren’t allowed to say? And what can I learn from her life and from her afterlife?
Walking down Haworth’s steep Main Street, I spot a cartoon pasted in a bookshop window. In Dude Watchin’ With the Brontës, Kate Beaton draws Charlotte and Emily lusting after various dark, brooding Heathcliff-types. Anne bursts their bubble, saying these men are all right ‘If you like alcoholic dickbags!’ Charlotte snaps back, ‘No wonder nobody buys your books.’ Maybe this is why Anne isn’t read: she is too radical. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, she takes a heroine who starts out like all the other Brontë heroines, charmed by a sexy dangerous man, but she sees the light and leaves him. It’s very refreshing. And it wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear in 1848.
Later, on the bus to the nearest town, Keighley, bumping along and squinting at my phone, I read the preface Anne wrote to the second edition of the novel – published after the first edition sold out in just six weeks. ‘I wished to tell the truth,’ she writes, and truth ‘hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it, especially as he that does so will be likely to incur more scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge, than thanks for the jewel he procures’. The image of her emerging triumphant from the well, covered in mud, drenched, but grasping a jewel, decides me. I am going to dive into mud and water too, to see what I can find.
I know it won’t be easy. Anne says that diving for the truth takes courage. And she will be hard to get to know. She wasn’t hungry for fame like Charlotte, who carefully managed her public image. She wasn’t unconventional like Emily, who tramped the moors in odd clothes and learned to shoot. Even Branwell, who never got anywhere as a writer or an artist, leaves a stronger impression – maybe because he was a man, encouraged to stomp messily through the world, while Anne was taught to tread carefully, and cover her tracks. Or were they covered for her?
But I want to try. After years of reading and rereading Charlotte and Emily, I want to spend some time in Anne’s company, to find out who she really was, and what she had to say. On the train, speeding south, I make a list of things to read, places to go, people to talk to.
It’s late now, and the dark is seeping in at the windows, and everyone else on the train is asleep, but I’m wide awake. Maybe because I’m a year off turning forty, and single, and not a parent, and maybe because much of the writing I have done has been for the theatre, which is so heartbreakingly ephemeral, I’ve recently started to think about what mark I might make, what I might leave behind. Now the words of Anne’s last letter are going round in my head. I long to do some good in the world too. But I don’t know how. I feel stuck, somehow; limited, boxed-in, uneasy about where to go next, an anxiety sharpened by the fact that, having suffered from seizures for just over twenty years, I am also facing the future with all the challenges and complications of a chronic condition. How did Anne find her purpose? Did she feel she’d left enough of a mark, and what does it mean that so much of that has been erased? I read that Anne began her first novel with the promise that ‘All true histories contain instruction’. If, despite the sparse record, and the encrustation of myth, I can arrive at any kind of truth about Anne, what will I learn?
Later, I’ll study a photograph of the flyleaf of Anne’s Bible, which is now in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. When she turned twenty, Anne decided to read and study the Bible right through, to make up her own mind about what was in it. This is, it turns out, a very Anne-ish thing to do. Serious and searching, fearless in her pursuit of the truth, she is the best companion I could have found for trying to work out how to live a more considered life. In her Bible, she wrote in pencil what I am asking myself as the train pulls into London: ‘What, Where, and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’