The Brontë Sisters

The Brontë Sisters

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Born to  Patrick Brontë, an Irish Anglican clergyman and Maria were six children. They were Maria Brontë, Elizabeth Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Branwell Brontë, Anne Brontë. The mother died of what is believed to have been uterine cancer. Two elder daughters Maria and Elizabeth died later of tuberculosis.

The children lacked formal education. They hardly went to school to avoid epidemic deceases. But they accessed their father’s well-stocked library. The three Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne had piano lessons and art lessons. Their aunt tried to teach the girls how to run a household, but their minds were more inclined to literature. After they complete education in boarding schools and at home they took jobs as teachers and governesses. As the daughters of a poor clergyman, they needed to earn a living.

Charlotte discovered manuscripts of Emily’s poems and found she and her sisters were fond of writing. She proposed that they should be published. In 1846 without informing their family they published ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’ under pseudonyms. Only two copies of the book were sold, but it was the stepping stone of their work. In 1895 after the death of the last member of their family, their house, the parsonage was made into the Brontë Parsonage Museum which is maintained by the Brontë Society in honour of the Brontë sisters in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.

Charlotte Brontë’s unfinished fragments of her work were later published. ‘The Green Dwarf, A Tale of the Perfect Tense’ was published in 2003. The fragment of a new novel she had been working on in her last years has been completed by a recent author. ‘Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë’ by Clare Boylan was published in 2003.