One of the greatest insights into the lives of the Brontë sisters comes through the letters of Charlotte Brontë. Emily wrote letters very rarely, and whilst Anne Brontë may have penned more we have few surviving letters from her. Thankfully we have hundreds of letters from Charlotte Brontë – and very enlightening they are. Sometimes the most interesting and moving are those that on other levels seem mundane – such as those to her cousin Eliza Kingston.
The Brontës had many cousins on their mother’s side of the family: the Branwells of Penzance, Cornwall (pictured at the head of this post). Eliza was, in my opinion, the most fascinating of them. She was the daughter of their Aunt Jane Branwell, who had married a Methodist minister named Reverend John Kingston. He was later thrown out of the Methodist church in disgrace and took his wife and two sons to start a new life in America. Jane was pregnant at the time, and cousin Eliza was born in the United States – but within a year Jane had left her husband and taken baby Eliza with her back to Cornwall, leaving her two sons behind with their father. I think we can definitely see an influence in Anne Brontë’s tenant of Wildfell Hall in the life of her Aunt Jane Kingston.
Charlotte wrote two letters, or at least two which are still extant to Eliza in 1846, and they shine a light on familiar British conversational talks: conversations about weather, and illnesses. They also show Charlotte and Eliza discussing money – Eliza, after all, was one of the four nieces given a joint share of the legacy of Aunt Branwell: along with Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Presumably, Elizabeth ‘Aunt’ Branwell felt that Eliza was the niece most in need of her help. Here are Charlotte’s letters:
Two months later Charlotte was again writing to her Cornish cousin:
I find it heartwarming to think that the Brontës, or at least Charlotte, not only knew of their Branwell cousins four hundred miles away in Cornwall, they kept in touch with them. We know that Patrick Brontë continued to write to Eliza even after Charlotte’s death in 1855. As for Eliza, she had a life perhaps even more tragic than the Brontës. The shares she had invested in lost everything, and she ended her days completely destitute in an asylum. It was said that she too wrote a book, but nobody wanted to read it. If only that book could surface today!
I hope you can join me here next Sunday when I’ll be surfacing with another new Brontë blog post.