PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

THE BRONTË SISTERS

Three Novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey

CHARLOTTE BRONTË was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1816, the third of six children of Patrick and Maria Brontë. In 1820 her father was appointed perpetual curate of Haworth, a small town in the rapidly industrializing Pennines, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Mrs. Brontë died in 1821, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came to take care of the children—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Anne. In 1824 the four oldest girls were sent to a boarding school for daughters of the clergy (later to be fictionalized “Lowood” in Jane Eyre). Maria and Elizabeth were taken ill at the school and returned home in the summer of that year. For the next six years, the young Brontës were educated at home. They developed a rich fantasy life among themselves, constructing together the imaginary world of Glass Town and writing in dozens of microscopically printed “books.” Charlotte and her brother Branwell invented their shared kingdom of Angria in 1834. From 1831 to 1832 Charlotte went as a pupil to Miss Wooler’s boarding school for young ladies at Roe Head; she returned there as a teacher from 1835–38. After working for a period as a private governess, in 1842 she went with her sister Emily to study languages at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, returning there as a teacher in 1843. She returned to Haworth in 1844. In 1846, at Charlotte’s instigation, the Brontë sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected by several publishers, and not published until 1857. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and was an instant success. Branwell Brontë died in September 1848, Emily in December of the same year, and Anne in May 1849. Charlotte, the only survivor, continued to live at Haworth Parsonage with her father. Shirley was published in 1849 and Villete in 1853, both pseudonymously. In 1854, Charlotte married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls; she died on March 31, 1855.

EMILY JANE BRONTË (1818–48) was born at Thornton in Yorkshire. Two years later her father, Patrick Brontë, was appointed perpetual curate of Haworth, near Bradford. After the death of their mother in 1821 and of two elder sisters in 1825 the surviving Brontë children—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell—were brought up in this somewhat bleak parsonage by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. They formed their own closely integrated society and in the Biographical Notice to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte explains the inducement to write: “We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” They wrote tales, fantasies, poems, journals, and serial stories and brought out a monthly magazine. Emily collaborated with Anne to write the Gondal cycle, which inspired some of her most passionate poems. After Charlotte’s discovery of her poetry notebooks, Emily reluctantly agreed to a joint publication with her sisters of Poems (attributed to Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846). She is best remembered, however, for her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847; written under the pseudonym Ellis Bell). Published a year before her death from tuberculosis, it is perhaps the most passionately original novel in the English language.

ANNE BRONTË was born in 1820, the youngest of the Brontë family. She was educated mainly at home and, as a child, was especially close to Emily. Together they invented the imaginary world of Gondal, the setting for many of their dramatic poems. Like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, she tried to make a living as a governess and held two posts, the first with the Inghams at Blake Hall and later with the Robinsons at Thorp Green Hall, near York. Her experiences with the overindulged young children and the worldly older children of these two households are vividly portrayed in Agnes Grey, which was first published in 1847. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, appeared in 1848. She died in Scarborough in 1849.