Elizabeth was the elder sister of Mrs Maria Brontë, and one of the four daughters of Thomas Branwell (1746–1808) of Penzance, Cornwall. He left £50 per annum to each of his daughters, and Elizabeth was able to save some of her income. In 1815 she stayed with the Brontës in Thornton, and in 1821 was with them again in Haworth, helping to look after the family. After Mrs Brontë’s death Elizabeth returned to Haworth, and kept the household in good order. She helped to educate Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who respected her though they occasionally resented her discipline. She responded generously to Charlotte and Emily’s wish to study foreign languages by financing their stay at Mme Heger’s pensionnat in Brussels in 1842. At home she made a favourite of Branwell Brontë, who witnessed with acute pain the agonizing suffering from obstruction of the bowel which caused her death on 29 October 1842. By her will she left the residue of her estate to be divided equally between the Brontë sisters and their cousin Elizabeth Jane Kingston. The sisters’ investment of her legacy enabled them to pay for the publication of Poems in 1846, and Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in 1847.
Anne was the youngest sister of Charlotte. Her mother died on 15 September 1821, so Anne was brought up and at first educated mainly by her aunt Elizabeth Branwell at Haworth Parsonage. She was the playmate of Emily, and with her created the exotic, imaginary land of Gondal. From October 1835 she attended Margaret Wooler’s school at Roe Head, until an acute illness accompanied by a spiritual crisis in December 1836 necessitated her return to Haworth. She may have returned to school for a further year. Her tribulations as a governess to the Ingham children at Blake Hall near Mirfield are echoed in those of Agnes Grey at Wellwood. At home she met the young curate William Weightman, and was admired by him. In May 1840 she became governess to the daughters of Revd Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green, near York. A ‘persecuted stranger amongst insolent people’, recalled in the Horton Lodge episodes of Agnes Grey, she longed for home, but eventually gained the respect and affection of her pupils. Her troubles increased after her brother Branwell became the young Edmund Robinson’s tutor in January 1843, and it seems that she did not contradict Branwell’s later assertion that Mr Robinson dismissed him after discovering his affair with his wife Lydia Robinson. Anne’s contributions to the ‘Bells” Poems in 1846, and her novel Agnes Grey in 1847, made comparatively little impact. But her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (June 1848) was found offensive in its frank treatment of depravity, and Anne wrote a preface to the second edition explaining that she intended to impress her moral warning by telling the truth. Anne’s health declined in late 1848, tubercular symptoms were diagnosed, and she died on 28 May 1849 at Scarborough, where Charlotte and Ellen Nussey had taken her, at her own wish, in the hope of prolonging her life.
Emily was Charlotte’s sister. She was taken to Cowan Bridge school (the ‘Lowood’ of Jane Eyre) on 25 November 1824, but was brought home on 1 June 1825 after an outbreak of ‘low fever’ at the school. In Haworth she was educated by her Aunt Branwell and her father, and shared with Anne the creation of their imaginary land of Gondal. On 29 July 1835 she became a pupil at Roe Head school, but soon fell ill away from home and the freedom of her beloved moors, and returned to Haworth in October. There she took on many of the household duties, but managed to study German ‘as she kneaded the dough’. From October 1838 she endured six months’ drudgery as a teacher at Law Hill school near Halifax. Nevertheless the years 1836–40 were her richest creative period as a poet. On 12 February 1842 she accompanied Charlotte to Mme Heger’s pensionnat in Brussels, where she worked hard, mastered more German as well as French, and wrote some highly original and forceful French essays, recognizing the existence of cruelty in the animal and human world. In autumn 1845 Charlotte discovered some of Emily’s poems, and with difficulty persuaded her that they were worth publication. The Athenaeum reviewer of the ‘Bells’’ Poems praised those of ‘Ellis Bell’ for ‘can evident power of wing’. Emily’s Wuthering Heights, published by Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847, shocked and baffled many reviewers by its savagery, but some realized its unique power. Though Emily’s health rapidly declined in the autumn of 1848, she refused medical help until it was too late, and died, wasted with consumption, on 19 December 1848.
Charlotte Brontë’s brother was only four years old when his mother died, and he came to regard his Aunt Branwell as a mother. Mr Brontë educated him at home. He was an avid reader, and wrote prolifically, imitating magazine reviews, composing poems and dramas, and collaborating with Charlotte in their Glasstown and Angrian sagas. From 1835 onwards he begged influential writers and the editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine to acknowledge his poetic talent, and he succeeded in publishing eighteen poems in reputable local newspapers between 1841 and 1847. His other ambition was to be an artist. In 1835 he studied painting with William Robinson of Leeds, and in 1838 made a vain attempt to earn his living as a portrait painter. Despite his lack of skill, he produced a rather wooden portrait of his three sisters which gives some idea of their personality and features, and a second group portrait of which only the haunting image of Emily survives. His post as tutor to the sons of Robert Postlethwaite of Broughton-in-Furness from January to June 1840 ended in his dismissal, probably in disgrace. A railway clerkship at Sowerby Bridge station, 31 August 1840-April 1841, was followed by a similar position at Luddenden Foot station near Halifax. Dismissed owing to the dishonesty of a porter for whom he was responsible, Branwell returned home depressed and ill in March 1842. In January 1843 he became the tutor of Edmund Robinson, the son of Anne Brontë’s employer at Thorp Green, near York. This situation he kept until 17 July 1845, when he received a letter from Mr Robinson dismissing him for conduct ‘bad beyond expression’. In a letter of October 1845 to the railway engineer Francis Grundy, Branwell alleged that Mrs Lydia Robinson had declared ‘more than ordinary feeling’ for him, and that he had ‘daily “troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear” in the society of one whom I must, till death, call my wife’. After Mr Robinson’s death on 26 May 1846, Branwell claimed that only a clause in her husband’s will prevented her from marrying him. The clause did not exist; but Branwell lost direction in his life, spent whatever money he was given on drink or drugs, incurred debts which his family had to pay, and became physically frail. He died on 24 September 1848 of ‘chronic bronchitis and marasmus’—a wasting of the flesh without apparent disease.
Charlotte Brontë’s father was born in Emdale, County Down, Ireland. In about 1798 he became a tutor in the family of the evangelical rector, Revd Thomas Tighe, who helped him to study theology. He entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1802, graduated BA in 1806, and was ordained priest in 1807. During his curacy at Wethersfield, Essex, 1806-January 1809, he became engaged to Mary Mildred Burder, whose family disapproved, and the engagement was broken off in or before 1810. Curacies at Wellington, Shropshire, in 1809 and Dewsbury, Yorkshire, until early 1811 were succeeded by a perpetual curacy (equivalent to a vicariate) at Hartshead-cum-Clifton. On 29 December 1812 he married Maria Branwell, and with her and their two baby daughters Maria and Elizabeth, born in 1813 and 1815, moved to take up a perpetual curacy at Thornton near Bradford in May 1815. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë were all born at Thornton. In April 1820 the family moved to Haworth, where Mrs Brontë died on 15 September 1821, probably from a uterine cancer. Mr Brontë was to be the perpetual curate there for the rest of his life. In 1824 he took his four older daughters to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, but all were brought home in 1825. Maria died on 6 May and Elizabeth on 15 June 1825, both of them from pulmonary tuberculosis. With his sister-in-law Elizabeth Branwell Mr Brontë educated the children at home for the next five years. In 1832 he established a Sunday school in Haworth, and later worked for other local causes, taking the lead in petitioning the General Board of Health for assistance in procuring a better water supply for Haworth in August 1849. By mid-1846 he was almost completely blind. Charlotte took him to Manchester, where a successful operation for cataract was performed. He was profoundly distressed by the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne, and became increasingly protective of and dependent upon Charlotte. He was fiercely opposed to the idea of her marriage with his curate, Arthur Nicholls, but was gradually brought round to a more favourable view, consenting to their engagement in April 1854. After their marriage he remained on amicable terms with Mr Nicholls, who continued to care for him after Charlotte’s death. Between 1855 and 1857 he cooperated with Elizabeth Gaskell in her writing of Charlotte’s life, asking only for the correction of ‘a few trifling mistakes’, despite her misrepresentation of him as a violent man and harsh husband. He was bedridden for a few months before his death on 7 June 1861. Though he became somewhat prejudiced with age, he was a man of integrity, with a staunch, evangelical Christian faith. His published poems, moral tales, sermons, and tracts, his encouragement of his children’s reading, and his willingness for them to have lessons in art and music, all enriched their lives and contributed to their achievements.
London booksellers and publishers, established 1828; later Aylott and Son. Aylott senior retired in 1866 and died in 1872. The firm published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in 1846. In January 1850 they published the first number of the Pre-Raphaelite magazine of poetry and thoughts on art, The Germ.
Merchant, minor poet, and friend and patron of writers; born in Drumcrool, Durrisden, Dumfriesshire; clerk in a merchant’s office in London 1828–37, head of a firm of wholesale silk traders in London 1848–74. The writer Mary Russell Mitford thought him brilliant and a fine speaker, and praised his poems. Charlotte Brontë assured him that she and her father enjoyed his visit to Haworth Parsonage on 19 September 1853. Though she thanked him for inviting her to visit his London home, she was never able to do so.
A loyal servant at Haworth Parsonage, July 1841–61, and subsequently an occasional guest and helper in the household of the Revd A. B. Nicholls and his relatives in Banagher, Ireland.
Essayist and poet, the precocious eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Intemperance cost him a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, and he did not fulfil his early promise; but he published poems and literary criticism in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and was admired by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë, who sent him examples of their writing for criticism.
An author admired by Branwell Brontë and his sisters. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater were first published in the London Magazine in 1821, and then in volume form in 1822. On 16 June 1847 Charlotte Brontë sent a copy of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to De Quincey.
A member of the Dixon family of Birmingham, which included her brother, the educational reformer and MP, George Dixon (1820–98). She was a cousin of Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor, q.v. Charlotte met Mary Dixon in Brussels in 1842–3, and her portrait of Charlotte is now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Poet and critic, once famous for his dramatic poem, The Roman (1850), but sharply criticized for his frenetic ‘spasmodic’ poem, Balder (1854). Charlotte was grateful for his perceptive critique of Wuthering Heights in the Palladium for September 1850.
Novelist and first biographer of Charlotte Brontë. She married Revd William Gaskell (1805–84), Unitarian minister at Cross Street Chapel, Manchester. Charlotte read her novels Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853), and most, or perhaps all, of North and South (1854–January 1855). She also enjoyed Cranford, and some of Gaskell’s other stories. Charlotte first met her in August 1850, found her congenial, corresponded and stayed with her, and welcomed her as a visitor to Haworth Parsonage in September 1853. At Mr Brontë’s request, she wrote her Life of Charlotte (1857), after visiting many of her correspondents and requesting the loan of Charlotte’s letters to them. Her personal friendship and sympathetic understanding make her biography invaluable, despite her careful removal of any traces of the ‘coarseness’ that critics had detected in Charlotte’s novels.
Teacher of Charlotte and Emily Brontë in Brussels in 1842, and of Charlotte also in 1843. Born in Brussels, he returned there after living in France from 1825 to 1829. In 1830 he married Marie-Josephine Noyer, who, with their child, died in September 1833 during a cholera epidemic. He married Zoë Claire Parent, the directress of a girls’ boarding-school (a ‘pensionnat’) on 3 September 1836, and they had six children. An inspired and inspiring teacher, he was a master in the Athénée Royale, a high school for boys, and also gave lessons in the pensionnat. He could be temperamental and choleric, but he was a devout Catholic and a benefactor of the poor. He recognized the talents of Charlotte and Emily, devised specially adapted courses for them, and lent or gave them well-chosen French books. Aiming to develop their analytic skills and appreciation of a wide range of literary styles, he made detailed comments on their essays, directing their attention to the need for clarity, relevance, and effective focus. Charlotte’s obsession with him during her second year in Brussels, and her resentment against Mme Heger as a devious rival, became increasingly difficult for her to control. Four letters to Heger, written in 1844–5, reveal her longing for a warmer response and more frequent letters from him. His character and her feelings are reflected most clearly in her presentation of M. Paul and Lucy Snowe in Villette.
Was born in Brussels to a French émigré, and took over a girls’ boarding school at 32, rue d’Isabelle, Brussels, in 1830. Her marriage to Constantin Heger on 3 September 1836 was to be a happy one. Of their six children, four were born by the time Charlotte Brontë left the school on 1 January 1844, and she became fond of their second daughter, Louise. Zoë Heger ran her school efficiently; but despite her initial kindness to her English pupils, her constant surveillance was interpreted by Charlotte as spying. During Charlotte’s second year in the pensionnat, Mme Heger may have been aware that Charlotte was attracted to her husband. Charlotte felt that she was too often left in solitude, and yet had no real privacy. The designing Mile Reuter in The Professor and the formidable Mme Beck in Villette have many of Mme Heger’s characteristics, as Charlotte interpreted them.
Novelist and biographer; author of Madeleine (1848), which Charlotte Brontë admired, and of many other books. Nathalie (1850), set in France, echoes Jane Eyre in some respects, and it may in turn have been a ‘suggestive’ book for Villette.
Born James Phillips Kay in Rochdale, Lanes. He practised in Manchester 1828–35, and published a study of lung disease caused by cotton-dust in 1830 and a paper on asphyxia in 1834. From 1835 to 1839 he was the assistant Poor Law Commissioner in Norfolk and Suffolk, and in April 1839 became secretary to the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. He helped to set up the pioneering Battersea Training School for teachers, opened in 1840. In 1842 he married the heiress Janet Shuttleworth (1817–72), with whom he had five children. Nervous depression and overwork culminated in a prolonged epileptic fit and his resignation from his secretaryship in 1849. He and his wife first visited Charlotte Brontë on 8 March 1850. Soon afterwards she visited their home, Gawthorpe Hall, near Burnley, and in August that year she met Elizabeth Gaskell, her fellow-guest at their holiday residence, Briery Close, near Lake Windermere. Through their social contacts they arranged privileged visits for her to art galleries and elsewhere in London. Sir James offered a curacy to Arthur Nicholls in 1854, but Nicholls, having promised to support the ageing Mr Brontë in Haworth, refused it. Janet Kay-Shuttleworth became an obsessive, religiose invalid, and lived apart from her husband after September 1854.
Freethinker, novelist, critic, playwright, actor, student of physiology, zoology, and psychology, and biographer of Goethe. Educated in London, France, and Jersey, he began to contribute to literary magazines in 1837, thereby making the acquaintance of Dickens, Leigh Hunt, and other writers. He became an accepted authority on French literature. He had four sons by his wife Agnes, née Jervis, but their ‘open’ marriage meant that she went on to have four children by Leigh Hunt’s son Thornton. Unable to divorce her since he had condoned her adultery, he nevertheless remained friendly with Thornton Hunt, with whom he founded a radical weekly, The Leader, on 30 March 1850. His liaison with George Eliot (Marian Evans) began in September 1853 and lasted until his death. Though Charlotte Brontë appreciated his reviews of Jane Eyre, she questioned his advocacy of a more subdued, Jane Austen-like style. She was hurt and angered by his harsh review of Shirley, but he atoned for this by his perceptive appreciation of Villette.
Novelist and writer on political, social, and economic topics. Her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4) were simple stories intended to exemplify and advocate social reforms. In November 1849 Charlotte Brontë sent her a copy of Shirley, acknowledging the ‘pleasure and profit’ derived from her works, especially her novel, Deerbrook (1839). Charlotte enjoyed visits to her in London (9 December 1849) and in Ambleside in the Lake District in December 1850, but was shocked by what she considered atheism in Martineau’s Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851), written with Henry George Atkinson. Martineau’s critique of Villette in 1853, mingling praise with objections to the characters’ ‘obsession’ with love, caused Charlotte to break off the friendship. Martineau’s Autobiography (1855) mentions Charlotte and many other writers. Though she was not a conventional feminist, Martineau believed that women should take pride in earning their own living, as she did.
The London publisher of Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The first two books (both printed by Newby) were full of printing errors, and Newby’s advertisements implied that they were by the same author as Jane Eyre . In June 1848 he informed the American publishers Harper & Brothers that he would be publishing ‘Currer Bell’s’ next work; but Charlotte Brontë’s next work, Shirley, had been promised to Smith, Elder, who demanded an explanation. Charlotte and Anne hurried to London to identify themselves as separate authors, and to confront Newby with his trickery. Newby published many other books, including Anthony Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, paying him nothing for it.
Husband of Charlotte Brontë from 29 June 1854 until her death on 31 March 1855. He was born in Killead, County Antrim, Ireland, but from 1825 he was brought up by his uncle Dr Alan Bell at Cuba House in Banagher, King’s County (now Offaly). After graduating BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1844, he was Mr Brontë’s curate at Haworth from 5 June 1845 until May 1853, then curate at Kirk Smeaton near Pontefract, Yorks., until June 1854, when after his honeymoon he resumed his curacy at Haworth. When Charlotte became ill he and the parsonage servants nursed her devotedly until her death. He returned to Banagher in 1861, living with his aunt Harriette Bell and her daughter Mary Anna. On 26 August 1864 Mary Anna became his second wife. He is portrayed as the ‘decent, decorous’ Mr Macarthey in Shirley . Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte hurt and angered him as an intrusion on his wife’s privacy, and his concern for her reputation led him to obliterate several phrases in the manuscript of The Professor, which he edited for publication in 1857.
Ellen was Charlotte Brontë’s closest friend for almost 24 years. She spent most of her life in Birstall or Gomersal in Yorkshire. She first met Charlotte Brontë as a fellow-pupil at Margaret Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Mirfield, in 1831. More than 350 letters from Charlotte to Ellen survive, forming an invaluable source of information about Charlotte’s life and personality. Ellen was not intellectual or widely read, and she was not in the secret of the Brontës’ published works until after Emily Brontë’s death on 19 December 1848. Charlotte’s preoccupation with Arthur Nicholls and her willingness to contemplate marriage with him caused eight months of estrangement from Ellen between July 1853 and February 1854. After their reconciliation through the good offices of Margaret Wooler the friendship was renewed, and Ellen acted as Charlotte’s bridesmaid on 29 June 1854. After Charlotte’s death Ellen made several attempts to publish Charlotte’s letters to her, but she was so concerned to protect the privacy of many people mentioned in the letters by editing out too-revealing references that she never completed an edition. She did however permit bowdlerized selections from the letters to be used in Mrs Gaskell’s Life in 1857, the American publisher Scribner’s Hours at Home in 1870, and Thomas Wemyss Reid’s Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph in 1877. She was eventually persuaded in 1895 to sell almost all her letters into what she imagined was the safe-keeping of the then-respected Thomas James Wise, now notorious as a forger and unscrupulous profiteer. She understood that he would bequeath them to the ‘Kensington Museum’. He denied that this had been a condition of sale, and proceeded to sell most of the letters piecemeal, at a vast profit, to collectors in Britain and America.
Brother of Ellen Nussey, he was a curate in Dewsbury 1835–7 and in Birstall 1837-February 1838, when he became ‘harassed in mind’. He was asked to resign from his third curacy (at Burton Agnes) by his vicar, C. H. Lutwidge, because of his inadequacy as a preacher; but his health improved during his curacy at Donnington and Earnley, Sussex (1838–44). On 1 March 1839, after Lutwidge’s sister, Margaret Anne, refused Henry’s proposal of marriage, he immediately wrote to propose marriage to Charlotte Brontë, accepting her refusal with pious resignation to the ‘Will of the Lord’. In May 1845 he married the wealthy Emily Prescott. Charlotte’s visit to Hathersage, Derbyshire, while Ellen Nussey helped to prepare the vicarage there for the newly married couple, made her familiar with the name ‘Eyre’. From July 1847 Henry and his wife travelled on the Continent in the hope that Henry would recover his physical and mental health. He died on 29 August i860 at Wootton Wawen, Warwickshire.
A friend of Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë. Her engagement to marry Ellen’s brother George was broken off owing to his mental illness. On 2 October 1850 she married Joseph Taylor (?1816–57), brother of Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor. Amelia’s daughter Emily Martha (1851–8) endeared herself to Charlotte and Mr Brontë. Though often wearied by Amelia’s fretfulness, Charlotte valued her affectionate nature, accompanied the Taylors on a brief holiday in Scotland and Ilkley, and wrote to her sympathetically from her own deathbed, when Joseph Taylor was also seriously ill.
Revd Edmund Robinson (1800–46) and his wife Lydia, née Gisborne (1799–1854), employed Anne Brontë as a governess from May 1840 to June 1845 for their daughters Lydia Mary, Elizabeth Lydia, and Mary. She may also have taught their son Edmund. Her experiences are probably reflected in those of Agnes Grey at Horton Lodge. Branwell Brontë was Edmund’s tutor from January 1843 to July 1845, when Mr Robinson dismissed him for conduct ‘bad beyond expression’. Branwell alleged that Mrs Robinson had become ‘damnably too fond’ of him, and that she would have married him after her husband’s death if a clause in Mr Robinson’s will had not forbidden her to see Branwell again on pain of losing her husband’s bequest to her. There was no such clause; and Mrs Robinson married a rich elderly relative, Sir Edward Dolman Scott, on 8 November 1848, soon after Branwell’s death. In 1857 Mrs Gaskell was threatened with a libel action by solicitors acting for Lady Scott, after she had stated, in the first two editions of her Life of Charlotte Brontë, that Branwell had been seduced and ruined by a ‘profligate woman’. Copies of the second edition had to be withdrawn, and Mr Gaskell had to direct his solicitor to retract, in a public notice in The Times, all statements imputing ‘to a widowed lady... any breach of her conjugal duties’ and more especially imputing to the lady in question a guilty intercourse with the late Branwell Brontë. The third edition of the Life was extensively revised.
Mother of the publisher George Smith, q.v., and model for ‘Mrs Bretton’ in Villette . A portly, handsome woman, she loyally supported her son when the defalcation of Smith, Elder & Co.’s foreign editor, Patrick Stewart, left the firm with heavy liabilities. George wrote of her ‘serene courage and clear intelligence ... she even made fun of our perilous position’. Mrs Smith and her daughters treated Charlotte Brontë with every consideration during her visits to them, but they found her excessive shyness and habit of silent observation disconcerting. Mrs Smith may have suspected that Charlotte hoped for more than friendship from her son. For whatever reason, Charlotte was unwilling to stay with the Smiths when she planned to visit London in November 1853.
Head of the firm of Smith, Elder & Co. at 65, Cornhill, London, which published Charlotte Brontë’s novels. Energetic and efficient, he paid off the firm’s liabilities, incurred by the fraudulent practices of its former head of the foreign department, Patrick Stewart. He also expanded the firm’s Far Eastern branches, exporting goods and books, particularly to India. He was the model for John Graham Bretton in Villette . He founded the Cornhill Magazine, in which Charlotte’s fragmentary novel, ‘Emma’, appeared in i860, and after making a fortune from selling Apollinaris mineral water, founded the Dictionary of National Biography, edited 1882–91 by Leslie Stephen, and then by Sidney Lee. Charlotte valued his friendship, found him attractive, and was cool in her congratulations on his engagement to Elizabeth Blakeway in December 1853.
Biographer and poet; Poet Laureate from 1813. An early friend of S. T. Coleridge, and later also of Wordsworth. Charlotte Brontë admired his poems, which included Thalaba (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), and she advised Ellen Nussey to read his Life of Nelson (1813). She asked for Southey’s opinion of her poetry in a letter of 29 December 1836. He considered that she had the ‘faculty of verse’, but warned her to write poetry for its own sake, not for the fame of being ‘for ever known’ as a poetess.
A Scotsman, despotic managing clerk of Smith, Elder & Co. He corresponded with Charlotte Brontë and collected the manuscript of Shirley from Haworth on 8 September 1849. During his farewell visit to Haworth in April 1851 before leaving England to establish a branch of the firm in Bombay, he may have hinted at marriage, without formally proposing. Though she was not attracted to him, she was miserable when two inconclusive letters from India proved to be the last he wrote to her. His marriage to a widow, Annie Ritter, in London on 23 October 1862 was unhappy. After his return to India in 1863 he held a succession of posts as newspaper editor, secretary of two societies, and registrar of Bombay University. He died on 29 April 1874 and was buried in Sewree cemetery, Bombay.
Elder daughter of the cloth manufacturer Joshua Taylor of Gomersal, Yorks.; a close friend of Charlotte Brontë, who portrayed her as ‘Rose Yorke’ in Shirley. Charlotte first met her at Roe Head, Margaret Wooler’s school at Mirfield, and later visited her and her sister Martha at the school they attended in Brussels. A clever, independent, and energetic feminist, Mary travelled and taught in Germany, 1843–4, before emigrating to New Zealand. She became an enterprising shopkeeper in Wellington, from where she wrote lively, outspoken letters to Charlotte, Ellen Nussey, and others. After her return to Yorkshire in i860 she wrote articles on ‘The First Duty of Women’, arguing that women should feel neither indignity nor hardship in working for their living. She contributed to Swiss Notes by Five Ladies in 1875, and wrote a novel entitled Miss Miles: A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago, first published in London in 1890.
Novelist. Life as an art student and journalist in Paris, where he met his future wife Isabella Shawe (1818–93; married 1836) was followed by more journalism in France and London. His first daughter, Anne Isabella Thackeray, later Lady Ritchie (1837–1919) wrote a memorable account of Charlotte Brontë’s visit to Thackeray’s London home in June 1850. After the birth of his third daughter, Harriet Marian (1840–75), his wife became incurably insane. Charlotte greatly admired Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8), and in ignorance of the family tragedy, dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. This led to rumours that it had been written by a former governess in his household. Charlotte read his second major novel, Pendennis (1848–50), and in 1851 attended four of his six lectures on the English Humourists of the eighteenth century. She also had the privilege of reading (and criticizing) the manuscript of the first two volumes of his Henry Esmond (1852). Thackeray paid tribute to her in ‘The Last Sketch’, his introduction to the two incomplete chapters of her last work, ‘Emma’, in the Cornhill Magazine for April 1860.
Licentiate in theology of Durham University 1839, ordained deacon 27 July 1839; a handsome young man who became Mr Brontë’s curate in August 1839. He lectured on the classics at Keighley Mechanics’ Institute in February and March 1840, enlivened life at Haworth Parsonage by his cheerful kindness, and may have been attracted to Anne Brontë. His conscientious visiting of the poor and sick led to his death from cholera on 6 September 1842. In his funeral sermon, Mr Brontë said he regarded him as a son.
A friend of Charlotte Brontë, she was the eldest of the five daughters of Dr Thomas Wheelwright (1786–1861), a London physician who took his family to Brussels for their education. All his daughters attended Mme Heger’s school for several months from July 1842, and met Charlotte and Emily Brontë there. Laetitia, a competent linguist and musician, became a good though not an intimate friend of Charlotte after both had returned to England. Charlotte visited the Wheelwrights at the Hotel Cluysenaar in the Rue Royale, Brussels, and recalled it as the ‘Hotel Crècy’ in Villette. She also visited, and in June 1850 stayed briefly with the Wheelwrights in their London home.
Literary adviser from 1845 to Smith, Elder & Co. He married Margaret Eliza Hills on 14 January 1826, and had eight children, most of whom Charlotte Brontë met during her visits to London. Though he rejected The Professor in July 1847, Charlotte was heartened by his discriminating response to it, and he warmly recommended Jane Eyre for publication. Loyal, diligent, and sensitive, he became a congenial correspondent of Charlotte, and offered comments on the manuscripts of Shirley and Villette. He wrote to her with delicate sympathy when she suffered the distress of her siblings’ illness and death. Their informal, confidential correspondence became more infrequent in 1852 and 1853, but he was sent a card announcing her marriage to Nicholls in June 1854.
An accomplished translator of German hymns, a pupil of William Gaskell, who gave her Greek lessons, and a friend of Elizabeth Gaskell. In April 1853 she met Charlotte Brontë in the Gaskells’ house in Manchester. Like Charlotte and the Gaskells, Catherine and her sisters respected the views of the liberal theologian Frederick Denison Maurice. Charlotte found Catherine intelligent and sympathetic, and confided to her, before her marriage, that her decision to marry the unintellectual, Puseyite Arthur Nicholls had ‘cost [her] a good deal’. The Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, edited by her sister Susanna Winkworth (1883), includes personal reminiscences of Charlotte.
Teacher and friend of Charlotte Brontë. Well-educated, and reputedly a good linguist, she set up a small boarding school of nine or ten pupils at Roe Head, Mirfield, Yorks., in 1831. Her sisters Katherine and Susanna taught French and art respectively. As a pupil at Roe Head from 17 January 1831 to May 1832, Charlotte heard stories of the local Luddite risings of 1811–12, later recalled in Shirley. Charlotte was a teacher at Roe Head for more than two years from 29 July 1835, and earned Miss Wooler’s affection. When the school moved to Heald’s House, Dewsbury Moor, in early 1838, Charlotte taught there until Christmas that year. After closing her school at the end of 1841, Margaret Wooler sometimes lived with relatives, mainly in Dewsbury or Heckmondwike, but she also took extended holidays in various resorts, including Ilkley, Scarborough, and Hornsea. She became a valued friend of Charlotte, helped to heal her rift with Ellen Nussey in 1854, was a welcome visitor at Haworth Parsonage, and gave Charlotte away on her wedding day.