Brontë

In the autumn of 1845, in the dining-room of the parsonage at Haworth, Charlotte Brontë opened her sister Emily's writing-desk in Emily's absence and read the manuscript pages of poems Emily had been keeping for nine years. The discovery led to the joint volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell under the three deliberately ungendered pseudonyms; it sold two copies. By the autumn of 1846 Emily was halfway through Wuthering Heights, the only novel she ever wrote. It was published by Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, was thought by reviewers to be the work of a violent man, and is now usually reckoned the most extraordinary single novel of nineteenth-century English fiction. Emily was twenty-nine. She had eight months to live when the book came out. She refused to go down to Halifax to consult a doctor. She died of consumption on the nineteenth of December 1848 at the parsonage, in the dining-room where she had written most of the book.

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Branwell Brontë died at the parsonage on the twenty-fourth of September 1848. Emily died on the nineteenth of December 1848. Anne died on the twenty-eighth of May 1849 at Scarborough on a sea-trip Charlotte had taken her on in the hope of saving her. By June 1849 Charlotte was the only one of the four Brontë children left in the parsonage, with the father, the elderly servant Tabby, and a curate she would later marry. She sat down at the dining-room table where she and her sisters had walked round and round in the evenings reading their work to each other, and tried to begin Shirley. The novel, which she had started before the deaths, was the first piece of writing she had to finish in a room where no other Brontë would ever read a sentence of it again. She finished it. She finished Villette after it. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died in childbed in March 1855, the last of them, aged thirty-eight.

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