AS CHILDREN, THE literary sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, along with their brother Branwell, created fantasy kingdoms with names like “Gondal” and “Angria” and made them the settings for elaborate, ongoing poems and stories. This “juvenilia”—a fancy term for the work that artists produce in their younger years—provides evidence of a remarkably imaginative family, though the sisters took their youthful creativity in different directions, and Branwell fell into alcoholism. Charlotte (1816–1855) left behind the Angria sagas for the realism of Jane Eyre (1847). Anne (1820–1849) published semiautobiographical fiction like Agnes Grey (1847). And middle sister Emily (1818–1848) drew on the melodramas of Gondal and Angria to create the tempestuous novel Wuthering Heights (also 1847!). How much do you know about this trio of Victorian writers? Take this quiz and find out.
1. None of the Brontë sisters—nor their brother nor two older sisters—lived to the age of forty. What disease killed all of them?
2. What job, considered respectable employment for middle-class Victorian women, do the title characters of Anne’s Agnes Grey and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre hold?
3. Which sister published a fictional account of her brother Branwell’s alcoholism?
4. Which two characters fall passionately (and destructively) in love in Emily’s Wuthering Heights?
5. Which Brontë novel begins with the line, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”?
6. What novel did Jean Rhys write as a prequel to Jane Eyre?
ANSWERS
1. Tuberculosis (known in their day as “consumption”). Charlotte’s death may have been hastened by complications of pregnancy.
2. Governess.
3. Anne Brontë. The novel is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
4. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.
5. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.
6. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).