In Search of Anne Brontë

Nick Holland

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780750982375, 9780750965255
• eBook ISBN: 9780750968690
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Anne Brontë, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Brontë sisters, remains a bestselling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels – Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontës, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable.

This revealing new biography opens Anne's most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationship with her sister Charlotte.

1

IN THE BEGINNING

My father was a clergyman of the north of England; deservedly respected by all who knew him.

Agnes Grey

The month of January 1820 was an exceptionally cold one in the north of England, and conditions were very hard for the workers of Yorkshire’s West Riding. Crops of wheat and corn had failed, peat farmers were left with nothing, and the moors and fields lay covered by a thick blanket of snow. Rivers and canals were frozen, and supplies of food and fuel were brought to a standstill.

The harvest of 1819 had been the poorest in memory, and the harsh January weather promised little respite in the year to come. People with little means and little hope were starving and freezing to death. Bodies were found in the streets, with nobody to mourn them. Families were left without breadwinners or broken up as men left the countryside and headed into the burgeoning new urban centres that offered jobs and at least a little hope for the future.

England was entering an age of increased automation, the Industrial Revolution was reaching its height and machines made by one were doing the work of many. It was a period of civil unrest, and discord hung in the air. Groups of people gathered together and plotted acts against the machines and the mill owners who used them. These men became known as Luddites, and the West Riding was a hotbed for them. They would break into factories at night, smashing machines before vanishing into the darkness, or they would intimidate mill owners and workers with threats that were sometimes bloodily carried out.

Others were taking an interest in the political sphere and agitated for suffrage for men of all social classes. Just five months previously, 80,000 people had gathered in St Peter’s Field, across the Pennines in Manchester. They had come to see Henry Hunt, a famous orator who was calling for political and social reform. Unrest grew in the crowd as the day progressed, and soon the local militia were called. These militia, not caring who was in the way, drew sabres and charged into the crowd, cutting down men, women and children. In an ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo that had taken place four years before, this infamous event became known as the Peterloo Massacre; it is in this world of change and unrest that Anne Brontë’s story begins.

Her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, was a priest in the Church of England. He had been born into very inauspicious circumstances in Emdale, near the village of Drumballyroney, in County Down, Ireland. Despite spending the majority of his life in England, his Irish accent remained undimmed. Due to their very particular circumstances, most of Anne’s formative days were spent in his company, so it is little surprise that contemporary accounts state that both she and her sisters spoke with an Irish accent,1 although Charlotte was the only one who would ever see the country of her forebears.2

Through determination and the kindness of benefactors such as local landowner Reverend Thomas Tighe, Patrick secured an education at Cambridge University and was then ordained into the Anglican priesthood. Patrick saw entering Cambridge as the start of a new life, and a new life required a new name. In Ireland, his family was known by the name Brunty, but from the time of his arrival in England, he called himself Brontë. A Latin scholar, he knew that Brontë translates as thunder, and he was also aware of the castle that Lord Nelson, a hero of his,3 had near the town of Brontë in the foothills of Sicily. These factors influenced his adoption of the name that was to become so famous. It is worth noting that neither he nor his children used the familiar diaeresis, the two dots above the letter ‘e’, from the beginning.4 Patrick often used a plain ‘e’, and in their early years the sisters frequently used the French accented ‘é’ in their surname. Only later in their lives was the ‘Brontë’ we know today uniformly adopted.

After positions as an assistant curate in the south of England, Patrick was offered the role of chaplain to the Governor of Martinique. He was a very inquisitive man, whose mind thrilled at the thought of new ideas and new places. A situation in the West Indies must have seemed highly appealing to him, but it was then that fate took a hand.

The vicar of Dewsbury, John Buckworth, was looking for an enthusiastic and evangelical cleric to help him in his parish. Dewsbury, like many parishes across the West Riding of Yorkshire, was growing rapidly, and priests were in short supply. Patrick recognised this calling, and in December 1809 he headed north to a new life.

By 1810 Patrick was curate at a village parish called Hartshead, near Dewsbury. On the moor near Hartshead is a marker point known as the Dumb Steeple. It was here, on 11 April 1812, that a bloody and terrible event had its beginning. A large crowd of Luddites from the region gathered at the steeple. Their target was to be Rawfolds Mill in nearby Cleckheaton.

The mill owner was a Mr William Cartwright, a man who saw progress only in terms of the revenue that entered his coffers, and who had replaced many of his men with cropping machines that worked tirelessly day and night. Cartwright had been targeted before, and as a consequence of this he slept in his mill along with five soldiers and four armed guards.

On this particular night a crowd of over 200 Luddites headed across the moor towards the mill. Patrick watched them march past his rented home at Lousy Thorn Farm, and, guessing their intentions, made his way to Hartshead church to pray for their souls. When the men reached Cartwright’s mill they tried to gain access but were met by a hail of rifle fire from within. A group of Luddites approaching from Leeds turned and fled at this sound, and soon the fields around Rawsfold turned red with blood and were scattered with the bodies of groaning men. Two were left dead and seventeen more were later executed after the York assizes.

That same night, Patrick heard a scraping and shovelling noise. Looking out of the church window, he saw by moonlight men digging at the earth. Having heard the shots carrying across the night-time stillness, Patrick realised that they were burying others who’d been injured at the mill and had succumbed to their injuries. He left them in peace to bury the dead, and later said a prayer over the unmarked graves.5 Patrick Brontë knew what it was like to struggle with poverty.

Later that year another event took place, and it was to have the most direct impact upon Anne’s story. One of Patrick’s earliest curacies had been at Wellington in Shropshire. It was there that he made friends with a schoolmaster called John Fennell. By 1812, Mr Fennell was also in Yorkshire, and he was running a boys’ school in Rawdon, near the growing city of Leeds. Knowing his friend’s skill at Greek and Latin, John asked if he would inspect the boys in the classics. Patrick had always taken a special interest in education – he had already served as a teacher while a teenage boy in County Down – so he readily agreed to his friend’s request, and in July he commenced his role.

Patrick spent a lot of time at Woodhouse School, but the pupils weren’t his only interest. It was there that he met, and fell quickly in love with, a woman, then 29 years old, by the name of Maria Branwell. Maria was the niece of John Fennell and had come to the school from Penzance, leaving behind her sisters Elizabeth and Charlotte, to assist her cousin Jane with the domestic duties of the establishment.

Eros cast his spell upon them both. It was a whirlwind romance, such as that which can rapidly consume two lonely souls a long way from home and family. They sent each other frank and loving letters, in which Maria playfully referred to Mr Brontë as her ‘saucy Pat’. On 29 December of that year they were married in the parish church of Guiseley. On the same day, and at the same ceremony, Maria’s cousin Jane Fennell married William Morgan, a curate who was an established friend of Patrick Brontë. The two friends performed the ceremonies for each other, sealing bonds that would last a lifetime.

Anne would later lament that she was unable to remember anything of her mother, but she was left in no doubt that she had been a very pious and intelligent woman, and indeed she had written an essay entitled ‘The Advantages of Poverty, in Religious Concerns’.6

The Branwells were a well-established family in Cornwall society and were staunch supporters of the Methodist cause, which was at the time having a revolutionary impact on the Church of England, from which it hadn’t as yet split. Her father, Thomas, was a wealthy merchant with a keen love of music, but both he and his wife, Anne, had died before Maria came to Yorkshire. As the title of Maria’s essay shows, she was predisposed to love a poor clergyman like Patrick Brontë, despite her own more exalted background.

It may seem strange that her wealthy relatives did nothing to help her transition into married life, but it is likely that they disapproved of the match and so cut her out of any inheritance or financial help that she could otherwise have expected. Years later Anne Brontë was to hint at this on the very first page of her novel Agnes Grey, where Agnes reveals a family background very much like that of the author. After revealing that her father was a northern clergyman, she continues:

My mother, who married him against the wishes of her friends, was a squire’s daughter, and a woman of spirit. In vain it was represented to her, that if she became the poor parson’s wife, she must relinquish her carriage and her lady’s-maid, and all the luxuries and elegance of affluence … but she would rather live in a cottage with Richard Grey than in a palace with any other man in the world.7

Whilst Anne exaggerated the wealth and position of the Branwell family here, there is more than an element of truth to this portrait.

From a surviving portrait we can see that Maria Brontë, née Branwell, had long, curly hair, like Anne, and striking eyes, like Charlotte, above a long aquiline nose. Despite their lack of monetary resources, and a life very different to the one left behind in Cornwall, she and Patrick were very much in love. It was during this first year of their marriage that Patrick wrote and published his first volume of poems, The Rural Minstrel, setting down his belief in a loving God and the importance of a life without sin.

At the beginning of 1814 their first child, Maria, was born, and from her earliest days she seemed to be an exceptional child. A year later, a sister, Elizabeth, arrived. They were now a happy band of four, but it was a struggle for Patrick to meet the needs of his growing family, especially as his incumbency at Hartshead included no parsonage, leaving him to pay the rent for his little cottage at Lousy Thorn Farm out of his small annual stipend.

Providence was to shine upon them, however. Shortly after Elizabeth’s birth, Patrick received a very timely and most interesting proposal from Reverend Thomas Atkinson, the curate of Thornton. Reverend Atkinson was a man of independent means, not reliant on the larger income that Thornton offered, but he had his eyes on a very different prize. He was in love with Frances Walker of Lascelles Hall near Huddersfield. He’d met Frances on many occasions at Kipping House in Thornton, home of the Firth family who were related to the Walkers. Thomas believed that by moving closer to Lascelles Hall, he could form stronger ties with her. In this he was not wrong, as they would later be married.

It was for this reason that Reverend Atkinson suggested to Patrick Brontë that they swap parishes. Thornton offered an increased income and came with a rent-free parsonage building. Patrick, of course, quickly accepted, and once the archbishop gave his assent, the Brontë family made the move to Thornton in May of 1815.

Thornton is a semi-industrial village on the outskirts of the city of Bradford. Its church, of which Patrick had now been made incumbent, was known as the Old Bell Chapel and was positioned at the southern end of the village, in a remote aspect surrounded by fields. The Church of England was not strong in Thornton, and most of the populace attended the dissenting chapels and schools, a problem that he was to face in his next parish as well and one that was becoming increasingly common across the West Riding of Yorkshire as a whole.

Other than the church, the main building of Thornton was Kipping House, home to the aforementioned Firth family who were to become so important to the Brontës. Kipping House is a very beautiful and imposing building, dating from the seventeenth century but largely rebuilt and extended in the eighteenth century. The Firths were the undoubted leaders of Thornton society and keen Church of England supporters. At the time Patrick arrived, with his wife and two young children, only John Firth and his daughter Elizabeth lived at the house, Mrs Firth having been killed in a tragic accident a year earlier when thrown from a horse.

The Firth family made the Brontës very welcome, and as Elizabeth Firth’s diary entries reveal, they spent much time at Kipping House.8 Soon after arriving in Thornton, Maria’s sister, also called Elizabeth, came to help look after the children. She would stay for a year at first, but she then returned at regular intervals; in later years, she made her permanent home with the family, a move that would have a profound effect on all of them, particularly Anne.

On 21 April 1816, another girl was born into the Brontë family. She was christened Charlotte after Maria’s sister. At this time, and with Aunt Elizabeth no longer in residence, further help was needed, and Nancy Garrs was taken on as a nanny. Nancy and her sister Sarah wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 In the Beginning
• 2 Early Loss
• 3 The Brontë Twins
• 4 Youthful Explorations
• 5 The Haworth That Anne Knew
• 6 A Purification of Fire
• 7 Going Out into the World
• 8 Exiled and Harassed
• 9 The Beloved and Lamented Mr Weightman
• 10 Separations and Returns
• 11 The Birth of Acton Bell
• 12 The True History of Agnes Grey
• 13 Light from Darkness
• 14 The Scandalous Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• 15 The Brontë Sisters Make Their Entrance
• 16 The End of the Unhappy Scapegrace
• 17 The Unbreakable Spirit
• 18 The Glorious Sunset
• 19 The Legacy Lives On
• Select Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright