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Anne Bronte

© Megan Drummond

When compared with her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, there has been very little written about the life of English novelist Anne Bronte.

Anne was born on March 17, 1820 in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. She was the youngest of the six children of Patrick and Maria Bronte.

Anne received most of her education at the Haworth parsonage, where the family had settled a year before their mother died. She read the Bible, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Milton, Byron and many, many others. Anne also took instruction from her sister Charlotte, who had been a teacher for a time in Roe Head.

Anne joined with her brother and remaining sisters in 1829 as they created the sagas of Angria and Gondal, imaginary lands in remote Africa. Very little of the Gondal saga, created by Anne and her sister Emily, exists today.

In 1839, at the age of 19, Anne Bronte went to work as a governess for a family near York. She was joined by her brother Branwell, who was working as a tutor, in 1843. Although it was not clear to her at the time, the experiences she had while working as a governess would serve as basis for her two novels.

When Branwell fell in love with his employer’s wife, both siblings were dismissed. They returned to Haworth to reunite the family for the last time. Anne watched her only brother fall deeper and deeper into opium and alcohol use. After the ill-fated 1846 publication of the sisters’ book of poetry, Anne began working on her first novel.

Agnes Grey was published in late 1847. The novel, deeply rooted in personal experience, was the study of the life of a governess. It was a collection of Anne’s recollections of the over-indulged young children and the worldly older children of the families that she had worked for.

Upon returning from a trip to London to meet their publisher, the Bronte sisters found their brother near death from his years of abuse. Branwell’s degeneration and death in September of 1848 were the basis of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in late 1848.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in three volumes and sold well. Anne’s stark descriptions of an alcoholic husband and his wife’s struggle to free herself from him were considered, by critics, to be inappropriate subjects for a woman.

A short time after the appearance of the book, Anne Bronte fell ill with tuberculosis. She died in Scarborough in May of 1849, at the age of 29.

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