The Brontë Sisters

1816–1855 (CHARLOTTE), 1818–1848 (EMILY), 1820–1849 (ANNE) AUTHORS ENGLAND

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear.

—A POEM BY EMILY BRONTË, FROM THE SISTERS’ FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK

There was a quiet knock at the bedroom door. Charlotte and Emily, who were already tucked in and reading by lantern light, looked up from their books with surprise. Who could it be so late at night? Their wild brother Branwell burst into the room. “Look what Papa has brought me!” he cried, handing them a small box. They opened the lid, and to their delight, they found a whole troop of brightly painted, wooden soldiers!

Charlotte grabbed one from the box and proclaimed, “This shall be the duke!” Emily took another tiny soldier, crying, “This one shall be mine. He is rather grave looking, so let us call him Gravey!” Their youngest sister, Anne, heard the commotion from her room and came running. She, too, chose a soldier for herself, which they named Waiting Boy. A thousand stories swirled in their heads: dragons, castles, grand adventures, and great dangers. At that moment the three sisters began creating the magical world of Gondal. All alone in their spooky, lonely house, they dreamed of becoming famous writers.

The Brontës called their passion for writing “scriblomania.”

The girlhood dreams of the Brontë sisters came true beyond their wildest fantasies, but at a high cost. All three sisters published successful novels that became classics of literature, and they were sensational stars in their day. Yet their world was overshadowed by tragedy and unhappiness.

The three famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, originally came from a family of six children. They had two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, and a brother, Branwell. Just after baby Anne was born, the family moved to Haworth, a cold, wet, industrial town in northern England, where their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had gotten a job. Behind their new house were the wild and windy moors, and in front stood the church and the cemetery. Their windows looked out over a sea of gravestones—perhaps a sign of the sorrows to come.

Haworth had no sewers and the water was very polluted, so it wasn’t surprising that almost half the children born there died before turning six and the average age of death in town was just twenty-five years old. Soon after the Brontës moved there, their mother died. The children were left in the care of their eccentric father. Mr. Brontë loved his children and taught them literature, history, and geography; he held weekly discussions on politics, poetry, and literature. But he also kept them isolated from the rest of the town.

Fortunately, the children had their books, their imaginations, and most important of all, their pens. Charlotte wrote: “The liveliest pleasure we had . . . lay in attempts at literary composition.” They entertained themselves by writing poems, stories, and even a monthly magazine. Their lonely house, the graveyard, the mysterious moors—all worked their way into the sisters’ writing.

But Mr. Brontë began worrying about the sisters’ futures. He realized that their only career option would be teaching. For that, they would need more education. When he sent Maria, Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Emily off to a boarding school, he had no idea of the nightmare he had committed them to. The girls were tormented by the terrible food, bitter cold, cruel teachers, and boring lessons. Worse yet, in 1825 a tuberculosis epidemic swept through the unsanitary school, and Maria (age eleven) and Elizabeth (age ten) died within months of each other. Charlotte and Emily were devastated and returned to the safety of their home.

Once again, the girls studied around the kitchen table. In 1826, when Branwell received his toy soldiers, the children began creating a world of stories around them. For the next five years, the girls—who were ten, eight, and six—wrote their tales in tiny, handmade books that were just two inches tall (exactly the right size for the toy soldiers!), in teeny-tiny handwriting that only they could read. In one year alone, they wrote eighteen of their tiny books!

Like the characters in her books, Charlotte was strong-willed. At twelve she vowed never to marry, so she could devote her life to writing, and at fourteen she had already written twenty-two manuscripts! After a few more years at a new school, where she blossomed into a star student, Charlotte returned home at sixteen to teach her younger siblings and to continue writing.

When she began showing her work to people outside her family, the reviews were not encouraging. She wrote to Robert Southey, a famous poet, asking for advice and enclosing some poems. He wrote back, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” But Charlotte refused to let this sexist attitude discourage her—she wrote sixty more poems that year. She turned down all marriage proposals to write. Her younger sisters were inspired and started to take their own writing more seriously too.

Charlotte caused a scandal when she exposed the crimes of her childhood school in her novel JANE EYRE.

While struggling to get published, the girls had to work as teachers and governesses. They hated it. In 1845 Charlotte read some of her sisters’ poetry. It was fantastic! She convinced them they should publish a book of verse together. They paid to have the book published, but had to call themselves Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to avoid the prejudice against women writers. It didn’t do them much good, however. Although the book got great reviews, it sold only two copies!

The popular Brontë stories have been made into movies. Check ’em out!

Undaunted, they turned their energy back to their stories, working together and reading their tales aloud to each other. Out of this collaboration came Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Anne’s Agnes Grey, and Charlotte’s The Professor. The three novels were sent off to various publishers, again using the male names, and after a year of waiting, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted for publication. The Professor was rejected everywhere.

Again, Charlotte refused to be discouraged by other people’s opinions, and she immediately started another novel. From her own experiences, Charlotte crafted Jane Eyre, the story of a rebellious governess who refuses to accept her station in life. When her manuscript reached the publishing offices of Smith, Elder & Co., it was passed around to several editors. They all loved it. One of the owners, George Smith, took it home with him; he couldn’t put it down and read the entire five-hundred-page novel in one sitting! Charlotte would finally be a published writer like her sisters.

Jane Eyre was an instant hit, praised for its original voice and fascinating story. It was also strongly criticized. People at that time weren’t used to strong, passionate heroines, attacks on church hypocrisy, or the idea of equal rights for all people, regardless of their class or sex.

Wuthering Heights was equally controversial for Emily’s descriptions of passionate love. When it first came out, it wasn’t as successful as Jane Eyre, but it eventually became one of the most popular novels of all time. One critic describes it as “perhaps the most passionately original novel of the English language.”

Agnes Grey was well-received, but Anne’s second book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was a controversy. It was a feminist story, attacking marriage laws and the different rules that men and women had to obey. Critics were so alarmed that they cautioned young ladies not to read any of the books written by the “Bell brothers.”

As praise and criticism for these revolutionary books grew, so did curiosity about the authors. The public wondered if they were really men, or if the novels were actually written by just one person. To quell the growing rumors, Charlotte and Anne went to London in 1848 and met with their publishers face-to-face for the first time. George Smith was amazed that such powerful novels came from the minds of these petite, quiet, shy young women. When the news got out, the Brontë sisters became even more of a sensation than before.

They had made it! But real life for the Brontës took a turn for the worse. Their brother, who was never successful, drank heavily and abused drugs. Like his sisters before him, he caught tuberculosis and died in September 1848. By December, Emily had also contracted the illness, and she died at age thirty. Just when Charlotte thought she could endure no more heartache, her baby sister Anne caught the same deadly disease and died the following spring, at just twenty-eight years old. In less than a year, Charlotte had lost her three remaining siblings and was left alone with her father. Of this time, she wrote in a letter to a friend, “Why life is so blank, brief and bitter, I do not know.”

For the next six years, Charlotte cared for her father, taking pleasure only from her writing. She published two more popular novels, Shirley and Villette, but felt something was missing from her life. In 1854 Arthur Nicholls, a man she had already rejected, asked Charlotte again to be his wife. She wasn’t exactly in love with him, but she knew he was kind and had a great sense of humor—something she could use after all her tragedy.

Some people believe that the Brontë’s drinking water was tainted, since it flowed beneath the graveyard next door, and that this was the reason for their sicknesses and early deaths.

She said yes, and in June of 1854 they were married. In just a few months she grew to love her husband deeply and was happier than she’d ever been in her life. Then at the age of thirty-nine, she became pregnant. But again, her happiness was not to last long. A few months later she and the baby died from complications.

Three lonely sisters, with little formal education, cooped up in a strange house on the remote moors, published three of the most thrilling novels of the day. While their novels were considered strange, brutish, feminist, and revolutionary one hundred fifty years ago, today they are loved as some of the most powerful, groundbreaking stories of all time. Along with Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens, the names of these sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—have gone down in history as three of the most talented authors ever.

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

I will rock the world by rewriting the textbooks in “kid language.” My goal is to have a child pick up a schoolbook and not think of it as a chore, but as an adventure. If knowledge doesn’t rock our world, I don’t know what will!

HOLLY METCALF AGE 14