2. A family of great talent
Irish-born Patrick Brontë and The parsonage
his wife Maria Branwell, moved
Haworth from Thornton in 1820
where the Reverend Patrick
Bronte was appointed Priest of
Haworth. They had six children
at that moment.
Haworth was an unhealthy, poor
town and the children spent Unfortunately Mrs Bronte died
much of their time either
walking on the nearby moors or of cancer in 1821. While she
at home, creating stories and was ill, the eldest sister, Mary,
Haworth
poems about imaginary lands. read stories to the younger
sibblings so that her mother
could rest. When the mother
died,the children’s aunt,
Elizabeth Branwell looked
after the children.
3. A family of great talent
The four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled as pupils at a
girls’ school where they were treated badly. They were cold and
hungry most of the time. The following year Maria and Elizabeth,
the two eldest daughters, became ill and died of tuberculosis;
Charlotte and Emily returned home .
4. • In 1831 Charlotte worked at a school, Branwell began to try and
become a portrait painter with little success. Emily worked for a short
time at a school in Halifax. Anne worked as a tutor to the Robinson
family. . Emily always found herself unsuited to the life and she
returned home.
• The other sisters were not lucky either, so in 1845 the Family were all
together again in Haworth and continued writing. They used the legacy
from their aunt Branwell's death in 1842 to finance a collection of their
poems. The Bröntes, published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell, due to the fact that they lived in an age of prejudice
against female writers.
5. • Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre (1847), Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847),
and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) were written while they
were living at the Parsonage.
• Branwell’s health deteriorated due to alcohol and opium addiction and
died in 1848 aged 31, Emily died from tuberculosis, aged 30 in 1848.
Anne was also ill from tuberculosis and died in 1849 aged 29.
• Charlotte, desperate, continued to write and published two more novels.
She married Arthur Bell Nichols her father’s curate. It was a short
marriage, Charlotte, who was pregnant, died in 1855 aged 38.
• Patrick Bronte continued to live at the parsonage, being looked after by
Charlotte’s husband and died at the age of 84. He survived his six
children and his wife.
• It was later known that the sanitary conditions in Haworth were very poor
and water supply was infected as the patronage was surrounded by
graveyards. If it hadn’t been so, probably the sisters wouldn’t have died
so young.
6. How could Emily Brontë write Wuthering Heights ?
Many commentators, especially Emily's contemporaries, found it hard to
believe that a reserved clergyman's daughter with little experience of the world
could have written such a unique, brutal and immoral (as they saw it) novel. At
the time, many assumed that the author was a man (because the Brontës had
written under pseudonyms) and some still believe that Branwell was the true
author……But we must not forget the power of imagination.
Walking alone on the moors or sitting bored in the parsonage on a rainy day,
Emily's mind could have drifted to all sorts of possible places. We know that
the sisters had access to a large collection of books including Walter Scott and
Byron, and the juvenile writings that they produced show an ability to fantasy
and imagination. In fact, it seems more likely that a person with a limited social
life would have imagined extreme stories like Wuthering Heights than a
conventional love story
