1. Elisabeth Jay, Introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin, 2004), p. xxvi.
2. Cited in Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix, 1995), p. 42.
3. See Juliet Barker, The Brontës, p. 78 for further discussion.
4. Winifred Gerin, in her biography of Anne Brontë, suggests that Miss Branwell ‘ruled by a tyranny of spirit, exercising her dominion by a strong appeal to the emotions over which, in the case of children with such heightened imaginations, she had an easy victory’ and argues that she was partly responsible for the religious crisis Anne Brontë experienced later in life (Winifred Gerin, Anne Brontë: A Biography [London: Allen Lane, 1976], p. 35).
5. Advertisement for School for Clergymen’s Daughters, Leeds Intelligencer, December 1844 in Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters (London: Viking, 1997) p. 5.
6. Admissions Register of the Clergy Daughters’ School, Cowan Bridge’ in Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 7.
7. Mark 10:9; Matthew 19:6. Prior to the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, divorce was only possible through an Act of Parliament. The Act made it easier for couples to divorce legally, but opponents frequently cited the Bible as evidence that, from a religious perspective at least, divorce -the separation of those joined in holy union – was effectively impossible.
8. In Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. i65.
9. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2001) p. i.
10. Ibid, p. 2.
11. Jay, Introduction to The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. ix.