The Brontë Sisters(1816–1855)

Charlotte Brontë was born on the twenty-first of April 1816 at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, third surviving daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born Anglican curate of County Down, and Maria Branwell of Penzance, Cornwall. Emily Jane Brontë was born on the thirtieth of July 1818 and Anne Brontë on the seventeenth of January 1820, also at Thornton. In April 1820 the family moved across the moors to the parsonage at Haworth, the small West Yorkshire weaving village above the Worth Valley, where the Reverend Brontë took the perpetual curacy of St Michael and All Angels' Church. The mother died of cancer in September 1821 when Charlotte was five, Emily three and Anne twenty-one months. The four surviving children (Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were sent in 1824 to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge) lost the two eldest sisters Maria and Elizabeth to consumption contracted at the school in 1825; the four remaining children were brought home to Haworth and educated by the father and the aunt Elizabeth Branwell who came up from Cornwall to raise them.

The juvenile literary work begins with the small wooden box of twelve toy soldiers Branwell was given by the father in June 1826. The four surviving children invented around the soldiers an elaborate imaginary world, the kingdoms of Angria (Charlotte and Branwell) and Gondal (Emily and Anne), and through the next fifteen years wrote across hundreds of tiny hand-stitched booklets the chronicles, poems and dramatic episodes of the two kingdoms. The Angria and Gondal manuscripts, written in tiny print to be read by the toy-soldier scale of their characters, constitute one of the most sustained juvenile collaborative literary projects in English-language literary history and the foundation of all four siblings' later work.

Charlotte and Emily attended the school at Roe Head from 1831, and Charlotte and Emily and Anne in turn the various paid governess posts that were the only respectable middle-class female employment of the period. Through the early 1840s the three sisters worked at the plan of opening a school of their own at Haworth Parsonage; the plan failed in 1843 for lack of pupils, and they turned instead to the publication of literary work under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The 1846 volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, jointly self-published at Aylott and Jones of London in May, sold two copies in its first year. Undeterred, each sister wrote a novel.

In 1847 the three novels were published. Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) appeared in December 1847 in three volumes from Thomas Cautley Newby of Cavendish Square, the only novel Emily wrote and on every modern list of the central English-language novels of the nineteenth century: the great Yorkshire-moors tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, published when she was twenty-nine. Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne) appeared at the same time from the same publisher, the small clear governess-novel that prepared the way for Anne's much-larger 1848 work The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the early Victorian novel of an abusive marriage and the woman who walks out of it, on every modern list of the founding texts of the English novel of women's social autonomy. Jane Eyre by Currer Bell (Charlotte) appeared in October 1847 from Smith, Elder & Co of Cornhill, the great first-person Gothic narrative of the orphaned governess and Mr Rochester, which sold out the first edition in twelve weeks and ran through three editions in the first year, and went on through the 1848 Shirley and the 1853 Villette to define the central English-language female-narrator novel of the period.

Branwell died of consumption in September 1848 at thirty-one, Emily in December 1848 at thirty, and Anne in May 1849 at twenty-nine. Charlotte survived the three of them, married Arthur Bell Nicholls in June 1854, and died in March 1855 in her thirty-ninth year. Patrick Brontë outlived all six of his children and died at Haworth Parsonage in June 1861, the year of the publication of Mrs Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the great biography that fixed the Brontë legend into the central English-language literary inheritance. The Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth has been open to the public since 1928 and remains one of the most-visited literary sites in the world. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have never been out of print in English in the hundred and seventy-eight years since first publication and are translated into every major language on earth. The Brontë name in modern English-language literature carries the weight of the three sisters at the Haworth parsonage who, between them in a single year, produced three of the central novels of the nineteenth century.