Author: insearchofannebronte@hotmail.com

When we look back at the classic writers and historical figures that we love it’s understandable that we start to wonder what they looked like, what they sounded like. In many cases, as with Anne Brontë, the former is easier to ascertain than the latter. We have portraits of Anne, although they were made when she was a teenager, and we have contemporary descriptions of her long brown hair falling in curls alongside her clear complexioned face, and of her beautiful violet blue eyes. But just what did Anne Brontë sound like?

There are of course no recordings, and no direct reference to Anne’s accent, but by looking at the facts about her upbringing we can make an educated guess, and she may not have had the Yorkshire accent that many people would imagine.

Let’s start by examining an account of Charlotte Brontë’s accent from her friend Mary Taylor, on the occasion of their first meeting:

“She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent.”

It seems then that the predominant tones in Charlotte’s accent at least had been taken from her father Patrick, a northern Irish man who would never lose his Ulster voice. If anything, however, that paternal influence would have been even stronger upon Anne. Charlotte was raised by her mother as a young girl, Maria who had a Cornish accent. We also know that she joined in childhood games with her neighbours in Thornton, youngsters who would have had Yorkshire accents. She also went to school at Cowan Bridge for a while, where she would have come into contact with many other accents.

Anne was exposed to none of these factors. She was a one year old baby when her mother died, and would remember neither her appearance or voice. She didn’t get the opportunity to mingle with Yorkshire children at Thornton, and didn’t go to school until she was 15 years old. The voice she would have heard day in and day out would be her father’s, alongside that of her Aunt Branwell whose Cornish accent may have been less than pronounced because of her relatively refined upbringing. In all likelihood, therefore, we can assume that Anne Brontë’s northern Irish accent would have been stronger than Charlotte’s was.

Whilst we have no direct account of her talking voice, we do have Ellen Nussey’s account of Anne’s singing:

“She sang a little; her voice was weak, but very sweet in tone.”

We have one other reference to Anne’s speech that is often, in my opinion, misinterpreted. After Anne took her first role as governess, to the Ingham family of Mirfield, Charlotte wrote to Ellen:

“It is only the talking part I fear – but I do seriously apprehend that Mrs Ingham will ‘sometimes’ conclude that she has a natural impediment in her speech.”

A recent biography of Charlotte Brontë by Claire Harman takes this to literally mean that Anne had a stutter, but as always with Charlotte’s pronouncements on her little sister we shouldn’t take them as the gospel.

Charlotte was referring to Anne’s shyness that would make her reticent to talk to strangers, she wasn’t saying that Anne had a stutter, or else why should she have put ‘sometimes’ in quotation marks, but rather that she could be so quiet that people might think she was incapable of talking at all. Of course, as was often to be the case, Charlotte had completely underestimated Anne’s determined nature. When she needed to, she could and did overcome her shyness and could converse freely.

Whether Anne spoke with a Yorkshire accent or, more likely, with an Irish one, one thing we can say with certainty is that she spoke, sang and wrote freely and beautifully.

Scarborough is a large and popular seaside town on the North Yorkshire coast, but its appearance today gives little indication, at first glance, of what it was like in the mid nineteenth century. It was then a luxurious resort visited by the cream of Victorian society, and it was particularly loved by Anne Brontë.

There are many indicators of Anne’s love of Scarborough: although not mentioned by name it features in both of her novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It is clearly at Scarborough castle that Weston proposes to the eponymous Agnes, and it is a sad irony that it is within the shadow of that same castle that Anne Brontë now lies buried.

As the early months of 1849 trooped by in sad progression, and Anne’s tuberculosis progressed along with them, there was one place above all else that she wanted to see: Scarborough. It was a place filled with happy memories for her, and filled with the sights and sounds of nature that thrilled her so, but it had one other attraction to Anne: it was a place that people came to take the waters, in the hope of regaining health or being cured of innumerable diseases.

One reason that Scarborough had become so popular by the 1840s was that it was a spa town. Its history as a spa can be traced back to the late seventeenth century, when a local woman Thomasina Farrer saw bubbling water running from the bottom of a cliff. Tasting the ochre coloured water she found it bitter, but later said that she found it to have curative qualities. Word of this soon spread, and by the early 1700s the first spa house had been built. Unfortunately, the spa’s location made it difficult to reach, except via a long flight of steps, and also vulnerable to the elements.

Coastal erosion was as much of a danger in the eighteenth century as it is today, and in 1737 a cliff fall took the original spa house with it. The second spa house was destroyed in similar fashion in 1839, leading to the creation of the building that Anne Brontë would have been familiar with (although that itself was replaced by a larger spa building in 1858, due to increasing popularity and demand).

The railway revolution also helped to popularise Scarborough’s spa, as it made travel to the town much easier from the 1840s onwards. This boom in visitor numbers also led to the creation of the beautiful spa bridge in 1827. Still open today, it links the spa complex with St. Nicholas Cliff, the site of today’s Grand Hotel.

In Anne Brontë’s day it was Wood’s Lodgings that stood adjacent to the bridge, and it was here that Anne stayed on many occasions, often with the Robinson family of Thorp Green Hall, for whom she worked as a governess, and finally in 1849 in the company of her sister Charlotte and their friend Ellen Nussey.

Anne’s first visit to Scarborough occurred in June 1840 and she would visit the resort with them on an annual basis until 1845. She would spend around five weeks there on each occasion, and she found it perfectly attuned to her spirit. The sea became for Anne what the moors were to Emily, she loved to hear it crashing against the rocks and watch the gulls wheeling above it beneath a darkening sky.

The spa complex was also of particular delight to Anne, as it was not only the natural mineral waters that brought people to it. The spa often hosted musical events and concerts, particularly during the summer months when fashionable folk from across the north of England arrived, and this was idyllic for the music loving Anne. As well as the spa’s concert hall, with seating for 500, orchestras also played on the elaborate gardens outside.

It is little wonder then, that Anne’s thoughts as she approached her final days turned to Scarborough, but now her mind was as much on the healing waters as on the happy memories of years gone by. Anne was enough of a realist to know that there was no hope of her being cured, but she did believe that the waters may, just possibly, restore her health a little and give her more time to do the work she longed to do. After all, some people with terminal tuberculosis lived for months or even years with the condition.

Anne was supported in this view by the Leeds based medic Dr. Teale, who in April 1849 said that taking the waters of Scarborough could be of some benefit to her. Charlotte, seeing how weak her only remaining sibling was, tried to discourage Anne from the journey, but as her letter to Ellen Nussey of 5 April shows, she would not wait any longer:

‘I have a more serious reason than this for my impatience of delay; the doctors say that change of air or removal to a better climate would hardly ever fail of success in consumptive cases if the remedy were taken in time, but the reason why there are so many disappointments is, that it is generally deferred till it is too late. Now I would not commit this error.’

So it was that Anne, Charlotte and Ellen arrived in Scarborough on 25 May 1849. One of their first acts was to buy tickets that gave them unlimited use of the spa and its facilities. The next day, a Saturday, Anne insisted on visiting the spa alone, much to the consternation of her sister and friend. Now in an extremely emaciated condition she took the waters, alone with her thoughts, her hopes and fears, preparing for her death. Anne also refused assistance from the Spa and walked home alone, but collapsed outside their lodging and had to be carried indoors by their maid Miss Jefferson.

It was clear now even to Anne that it was too late, healing waters or not there was nothing more that could be done for her. Even so, Anne continued to enjoy her final days in Scarborough, taking a donkey ride along the beach in a reflection of Agnes Grey’s actions towards the end of her first novel.

We can follow in Anne’s footsteps today when we visit Scarborough. The Spa building may be new, but the location is that same as that sought out by Anne Brontë. We can even stand upon the same Spa Bridge, and enjoy the thrilling sea view that Anne must have loved so much. Yes, people still travel to Scarborough today to take the waters, but if you plan on doing so please do watch out for the seagulls!

In last week’s blog we looked at Anne’s school days at Roe Head in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but her association with the town doesn’t end there. She left Roe Head towards the end of 1837 (we don’t know the exact date), but on April 8^th 1839 she was back in Mirfield – and this time she meant business!

Her family would have expected delicate, little Anne (as they thought of her) to stay safely at home in Haworth after a serious illness had forced her departure from school, but she had other plans. She very much enjoyed the company of her family, especially Emily, but she was determined that she should make her own way in life – she wanted to show people that Anne Brontë wasn’t as helpless as they seemed to believe.

It was a shock to them, then, when Anne told her family that she wanted to take a position as a governess. It soon became clear that she would not change her mind, she could be as stubborn as Charlotte or Emily when she wanted to be, and so the search began for a suitable position.

It seems likely that Anne’s old headmistress Miss Wooler was asked for advice, for she arranged for Anne to fill a position as governess to a family well known to her: the Ingham family of Blake Hall, Mirfield.

The Inghams were the wealthiest family in Mirfield, and as mine and mill owners the industrial revolution meant that their wealth was growing. They also lived in the largest house in the town, the large and imposing square shaped Blake Hall.

Anne was just nineteen when she arrived at Mirfield, harbouring dreams of finding well behaved children who were eager to learn. The reality was somewhat different. She had stumbled into a job as governess for children who were unruly at best, and something akin to evil at the worst. In a letter to Ellen Nussey, Charlotte would adroitly describe the Ingham children as ‘desparate little dunces’.

At the time of Anne’s arrival at Blake Hall, her charges were Cunliffe, aged 6, Mary, 5, Martha 3, and Emily aged 2; there was also a baby called Harriet. Their parents were Joseph and Mary Lister, and although they were keen on providing an education for their children that would allow them to go to boarding schools later in life, they would not allow any sort of discipline to be used on them. Despite previous governesses having tried their best, Anne was shocked to find that the children had little idea of the alphabet, virtually no knowledge of any subject at all, and were most unwilling to sit still and take lessons.

Anne’s time as governess to the Inghams was one of perpetual struggle. The children would refuse to sit still, and when she succeeded in making one sit in their chair, another would begin to run around. Sometimes they would roll on the floor screaming until their parents came in, at which point it would be Anne rather than the child who would be chastised. They would sometimes spit at Anne, or in her bag, or throw her belongings out of the window.

Whilst this was traumatic for Anne Brontë, the painful memories would lead directly to her first novel Agnes Grey, and the horrors she experienced at Mirfield are replicated in its pages. The Inghams were recreated as the Bloomfield family, just as the Robinsons she worked for later would become the Murrays of the novel. Blake Hall was renamed Wellwood House, and Cunliffe becomes the wicked Tom Bloomfield who loves nothing more than setting traps for animals and torturing birds.

At one point Cunliffe has a nest of young birds, and he tells Agnes how he plans to torture them. Agnes takes a large stone and drops it on the nest, killing it instantly. If this is taken from real life, then we can imagine how painful it must have been for the animal loving Anne.

There can be little doubt that, whilst it is a work of fiction, Agnes Grey the novel does contain many scenes taken from Anne’s own experiences at Blake Hall and at Thorp Green. Apart from the many instances in the novel that have an obvious parallel in real life, we have letters from Charlotte to back up some of the scenes in the novel. For example, Agnes says: ‘A good birch rod might have been serviceable; but as my powers were so limited, I must make the best use of what I had.’ Charlotte writes, talking of Anne’s reports from Blake Hall: ‘The worst of it is that the little monkies are excessively indulged, and she is not empowered to inflict any punishment.’

Indeed, Anne herself, in her preface to the second edition of the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, defended herself against accusations that some of the wild scenes in the Bloomfield section of the book were false:

‘The story of Agnes Grey was accused of extravagant over-colouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration.’

Anne Brontë was finally dismissed from the role of governess to the Ingham family in December 1839, with the parents unhappy at the lack of educational progress made by their children under her tuition. Given their character and abilities, however, she had done well to last for as long as eight months.

So what became of the Inghams? We know that Cunliffe and Mary as adults were both notorious for their vile tempers, although Cunliffe channelled his by becoming an officer in the army and serving in the Crimean war.

We also have a definitive account of an instance when Anne finally lost her patience with her charges. The story was told by Mary Ingam, mother of the children, to her grandaughter Gertrude Elizabeth Brooke, who in turn published it in the Mirfield parish church magazine:

‘One day grandmother, Mary Ingham, went into the schoolroom and found two of her children tied to opposite table legs while Anne wrote.’

The Ingham family went into decline, and the imposing and now old Blake Hall became too expensive to maintain. It was demolished in the 1950s, but the place where it stood in Mirfield is now home to the Blake Hall Estate centred upon Blake Hall Drive. Running off in one direction from this long, broad avenue are Ingham Garth, Ingham Close, and Ingham Croft, while to the south of the road are Brontë Close, Brontë Grove, and Brontë Way.

Mirfield hasn’t forgotten its connections with the brilliant writer who learned and taught there, but in death, as in life, Anne Brontë and the Inghams are on opposite sides of the divide.

A steep hilly Yorkshire town overlooking a river carved valley, once home to Anne Brontë. Sounds familiar, right? This time, however, we’re talking not about Haworth but about Mirfield, twenty miles to the south east, and a place that Anne both learned in and worked in.

Mirfield is a small town and yet a sprawling one, spread out across the Pennine hills and where strong legs are needed for the succession of climbing streets and alleyways. In the early nineteenth century it began to grow rapidly as it and the neighbouring town of Dewsbury were transformed by the industrial revolution. The area around these two towns, and other surrounding locales including Gomersal where Charlotte Brontë’s friends the Taylors lived, became known as the Heavy Woollen District. It became a world centre for the production of heavy wool cloth, ropes and blankets, and led to the introduction of mills across the valley bottoms and the sudden enrichment of local manufacturers.

A woman in her forties called Margaret Wooler knew that these local manufacturers would welcome a school for their daughters within the heavy woollen area, and so in 1830 she acquired a large house, built in the eighteenth century, from the Marriott family. Naming the school Roe Head she soon attracted the daughters of the new West Riding middle class, and a year after the school opened, Charlotte Brontë joined their number.

In 1835 Charlotte returned to Roe Head in the capacity of a teacher, and as part of the agreement she took her sister Emily along with her for a free education. Emily soon became so homesick that Charlotte worried for her life, which resulted in Emily returning to Haworth and Anne Brontë taking her place.

Anne would remain at Roe Head until late 1837, spending longer in school than any of her siblings did (although Charlotte and Emily would later return to education as adults at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels). Academically, Anne excelled. Always eager to learn, and eager to please, she had already gained a great deal from her Aunt Elizabeth and from her father, and indeed from the large collection of books and magazines that had been available to her in Haworth.

A mark of her success as a scholar was shown by the award of a medal to Anne on December 14^th 1836, bearing the inscription: ‘Prize for good conduct presented to Miss A. Brontë with Miss Wooler’s kind love, Roe Head. Dec. 14^th. 1846′

Anne also succeeded on a personal level in making friends with some of her fellow pupils, overcoming her natural shyness. Among her fellow pupils were Ann Cook and Ellen Lister. These are famously referred to in Charlotte’s angry ‘Roe Head Journal’, in reality a series of writings expressing her inner turmoil at this time. One such entry reads:

‘A. Cook on one side of me, E. Lister on the other and Miss W. in the background. Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society.’

Charlotte wasn’t always as dismissive of her youngest sister’s friend Ann Cook however. In recent years an inscription from Ann Cook has been discovered in one of Charlotte Brontë’s prayer books of this time. In it the pupil writes to her teacher: ‘Pray don’t forget me my sweet little thing’.

This can of course be interpreted in many ways, but it was at this time that Charlotte was writing to Ellen Nussey:

‘Don’t deceive yourself by imagining that I have a real bit of goodness about me. My darling if I were like you I should have my face Zion-ward though prejudice and mist might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted sincerity you have your faults. But I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me.’

Whatever Charlotte’s feelings were for Anne Cook, or indeed for Ellen Nussey, we shall never know, but we do know that the turmoil and depression Charlotte was suffering with at this time led her to treat her sister Anne coldly while they were together in Mirfield. This in turn contributed to the dark shadow that was creeping over Anne’s mental and physical health, an episode that we looked into in an earlier blog looking at her relationship with the Moravian church.

After recovering from her life threatening bout of gastric fever, Anne Brontë was sent to Haworth to recuperate. Her time at Roe Head was over, but it was far from the end for her time in Mirfield. As a pupil she would often have attended Mirfield parish church, even though it was a walk of over a mile to there from Roe Head and a very steep climb back to the school afterwards. The front pews were reserved for a special local family, the wealthiest in the town and one who had contributed to the cost of the building of the imposing new church. We can imagine the young Anne sitting at the back with her fellow pupils, looking disapprovingly at the misbehaving children sat at the front.

Anne was shortly to become much better acquainted with this family and with their children. They were the Inghams, and in the next blog we’ll take a closer look at them and reveal how they influenced Anne’s first novel, and also show how Mirfield today remembers both the Inghams and Anne Brontë.

December is a time when people buy turkeys, wrap presents, and hang up mistletoe, but there’s another reason for celebration in December – it marks the anniversary of the publication of two of the greatest books ever written.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, and Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë, were published side by side by the publisher Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847. They formed a three volume set, with Wuthering Heights occupying two volumes to Agnes Grey’s one. This was known as a triple decker and was particularly popular in the mid nineteenth century, especially among publishers who got to charge the circulating libraries who were among their main customers three times as much.

Whilst Wuthering Heights is rightly lauded the world over, Agnes Grey doesn’t get nearly as much as it deserves. Whilst very different to Anne’s other novel, the bold and dramatic The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey is, in my eyes, just as brilliant. In fact, I know I’m not alone in thinking that Agnes Grey is the most underrated book of them all, so just why do I love it so much?

One reason I love Agnes Grey the novel is the same reason that I rate Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley as her best work: it’s highly autobiographical, containing people and events that Anne knew.

The second paragraph of the book starts: ‘My father was a clergyman of the north of England’, just as Anne’s father was a clergyman of (i.e. working in) the north of England. It is the first of many clues that Agnes is in fact Anne, or Acton as the author was calling herself at the time.

When writing my biography of Anne I found sixty instances from the book that could be directly related to incidents in Anne’s own life. Of course, is a work of fiction, and a great one at that, but as every fiction writer knows there is not a single book that doesn’t have a piece of the writer in it, and to deny that is to misunderstand the art of writing fiction itself.

It seems to me that there is a lot more of Anne in Agnes than there is in most protagonists, and so by reading Agnes Grey we feel closer to Anne Brontë herself. Even without this to recommend, it’s still a wonderful and quick read.

Agnes Grey is the story of a governess and her dealings with two very different families, the Bloomfields and the Murrays (who seem closely modelled on the Inghams and the Robinsons who Anne herself had served as a governess). The Bloomfield children are cruel to animals, capturing and torturing birds, and cruel to their governess, fighting with her and spitting in her bag. This matches what we know of the Ingham children, who Charlotte memorably described as ‘desperate little dunces’.

The Murray girls that Agnes teaches next are brighter and kinder, but Agnes is shocked by their attitude to marriage, and by the way their mother tries to force them into loveless matches. Again, this matches what we know of the Robinson girls – one of whom eloped with a theatre owner’s son, and two of whom continued to write to Anne for advice long after she had ceased being their governess.

At the heart of the story, increasingly, is Agnes herself and her love for the assistant curate Weston. In this we can read of Anne’s love for her father’s assistant curate Weightman, just as we can in much of the yearning mourning poetry that Anne wrote after William Weightman’s untimely death (he caught cholera from one of the many parishioners he visited who were sick, a task that Weston carries out in Agnes Grey).

I won’t give the ending away, except to say that it is incredibly romantic, incredibly moving – is this Anne, as her alter ego Agnes, giving herself the life in writing that real life had snatched away from her? The end of the book is very simple, very understated:

‘And now I think I have said sufficient.’

Few novels end on such a simple sentence, and yet in its simplicity is the power to move a reader deeply. Agnes Grey is a wonderfully well written novel, it’s short but precise with not a word out of place. In my opinion it is the Brontë novel above all others that is perfectly formed, showing that Anne had already mastered the art of novel writing. It’s like little else in English literature, and to my mind it resembles the novels of the brilliant Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, novels where not much seems to be happening and then suddenly you realise they’ve gotten hold of your heart.

George Moore, himself an important writer of the early twentieth century, praised the book thus:

‘Agnes Grey is the most perfect prose narrative in English literature… a narrative simple and beautiful as a muslin dress… We know that we are reading a masterpiece. Nothing short of genius could have set them before us so plainly and yet with restraint.’

I have to agree, and so if you haven’t already done so, give yourself a Christmas treat – read Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. It’s not as long as some other books, not as dramatic, not as loud or brash, but it is a work of brilliance that whispers its genius from the first page to the last.

As the moors were to Emily Brontë, the coast was to Anne Brontë. A thing of beauty, a force of nature that spoke of eternity and hope, a showcase of nature’s unfeeling power.

The sea haunted Anne’s imagination even before she had seen it in person, as shown by this drawing she completed in November, 1839.

This is a picture that represents a confident Anne, full of hope for the life that lies ahead of her. Although she’d had a relatively short stint as governess to the Ingham family of Mirfield at this time, it was a new post with the Robinson family of Thorp Green Hall, near York, that was finally to give Anne a glimpse of the sea that she was dreaming about.

Every year the Robinsons spent an extended period in Scarborough, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Scarborough’s glory may have faded a little today, but at its time it was a very fashionable resort visited by the well to do and the aristocracy. The town is built upon two bays, and it’s also rather hilly, with a steep climb from the beachfront to Wood’s Lodgings where the Robinsons and their governess Anne stayed.

Anne found that the coast was all she had hoped for and more, and her journeys to the resort from 1840 to 1844 were among the happiest moments of her life. Such an impression did the resort, and the crashing, spraying sea make upon her that she also included it in both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (although it is never named explicitly in either novel).

It was also to Scarborough, and the sea, that Anne’s thoughts turned in the last weeks of her life. Anne was diagnosed with terminal consumption, what we call tuberculosis, on January 5^th 1849, and there was one place above all others that she wished to visit: Scarborough. It may have been because she loved the place so much that she wanted to see it one final time, or that she wanted to spare her father the pain of having to bury her so soon after he had buried Branwell and Emily Brontë.
It may also have been that Anne wanted to ‘take the cure’, which is why many people travelled to the resort. Scarborough, like nearby Bridlington, is a spa town, and it was said that the waters had curative properties. Certainly we know that Anne bathed in the spa during her final days, and whilst there was no hope of a complete cure she may have hoped it would rejuvenate her and prolong her life.

The Grand Hotel now stands on the same spot as Wood’s Lodgings, and has a blue plaque in memory of Anne Brontë on its wall.

Ellen Nussey, who was in Scarborough with Anne and Charlotte gave a moving account of the final night of her life:

“It closed with the most glorious sunset ever witnessed. The castle on the cliff stood in proud glory gilded by the rays of the declining sun. The distant ships glittered like burnished gold; the little boats near the beach heaved on the ebbing tide, inviting occupants. The view was grand beyond description. Anne was drawn in her easy chair to the window to enjoy the scene with us. Her face became illuminated almost as much as the glorious sun she gazed upon. Little was said, for it was plain that her thoughts were driven by the imposing view before her to penetrate forwards to the region of unfading glory.”

Let’s take a look at Anne’s picture again, painted ten years earlier. Anne in the middle gazing upon a glorious sun, a boat bobbing near the beach. This picture of a glorious sunrise at the start of a woman’s life, has now becoming a picture of a glorious sunset at the end of her life.

Some people have said that the picture may be a copy that Anne made of an earlier picture, an artistic exercise. I once discussed this with Ann Dinsdale, head curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. In her opinion this is an original work, as there are no other pictures known that are like it, and women at that time were encourage to paint and copy still life rather than figurative work.

What is certainly true is that it represents Anne Brontë’s love of the sea. If we visit Scarborough today, and gaze down at the sea, we see the same crashing waves she saw, hear the same sounds she saw, and we can become just as in awe of nature’s majesty as Anne Brontë was.

The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë was an entire mistake. It should never have been written, and it would be better for everyone if it never saw the light of day again. These aren’t my views of course, in my eyes Anne Brontë’s second and final novel is a soaring work of genius. Nor are they the harsh words of a critic, although many contemporary critics were in agreement that this was a rough, brutal, ungodly book. No, these words are the judgement of Anne’s elder sister Charlotte Brontë, and they would have a huge impact upon Anne’s reputation.

After the deaths of Emily and Anne Brontë within a few cruel months of each other in 1848 and 1849, the novel writing career of the two sisters, that had seemed so full of promise, was ended. Charlotte’s publisher, Smith, Elder & Co., approached her and asked if she would prepare new editions of her sisters’ novels to be published by them as a lasting tribute (the original editions published by Thomas Cautley Newby being put together in a decidedly sub-par manner). Charlotte was happy to do this for Wuthering Heights (although she changed much of Joseph’s dialogue to make it a bit more intelligible to readers outside of Yorkshire) and Agnes Grey, but she would not consent to do so for The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. This was her verdict in the letter to the publishers:

‘”Wildfell Hall” it hardly appears desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake.’

This verdict was unfortunately to be a lasting one. In effect Charlotte prevented the re-publication of The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall at a time when it was still in the public eye, and when it had in fact been a huge success – the first edition selling even quicker than Jane Eyre had. The novel was buried along with its writer, and would in fact not be published again until another ten years had passed.

This removal of Anne’s great novel from the Brontë canon caused great damage to her place in literary history. By the time the book reappeared it had been almost completely forgotten, and people thought of Anne as merely a footnote in the story of the brilliant Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Unfortunately, this attitude endured for a century and more, and only now is the book and its author getting the recognition they deserve.

In 1850, a year after Anne’s death, Charlotte Brontë finally revealed her sisters’ true identities to the world in her ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell.’ It is a short and strange biography, painting the sisters in a different light to how we know them to have been – emphasising their lack of education, and apologising for perceived failures in their writings. Once again, Charlotte acknowledged how wrong Anne had been to write The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall:

‘The choice of subject was an entire mistake… She [Anne] had in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail as a warning to others.’

This is a clue to one reason why Charlotte hated the book so much – she blamed it for Anne’s death. The intensity of the book, and Anne’s refusal to stray away from the truth brought a mental and physical strain that was greater than her frail, youngest sister could bear.

There is another clue in Charlotte’s paragraph above: Anne had for too long had to witness talents misused and faculties abused, and rather than ignoring this dread spectacle she had put it on paper as a warning to others. Read between the lines, and it’s clear to see that Charlotte believed the book was about their own brother Branwell. During his final and fatal decline into drink and opium addiction, Charlotte had turned her back on the brother who had once meant more to her than anything in the world – with one contemporary chronicler saying that she didn’t speak to him for two years. Anne, however, took a different course, and in Charlotte’s eyes a very wrong course.

Anne Brontë believed above all things in the power of redemption. However great a sinner you were, however many your faults and mistakes, you would eventually be redeemed and find peace in Heaven. This is at the hear of Anne’s poem The Penitent and especially at the heart of The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.

We see Arthur treating his wife Helen appallingly, drinking to excess, having wild drink and drug fuelled parties, disappearing for months at a time, verbally beating her into submission, stealing her possessions, destroying her work. And yet, after Helen’s escape to Wildfell Hall she returns to him to nurse him in his final illness. Why? Because it is the right thing to do, whatever the cost to herself, and because she believes that she can still save his soul.

Charlotte was undoubtedly shocked at some of Branwell’s failings being exposed to the world in the shape of Huntingdon, although he is also present in the character of Lowborough, who deep down has a good heart and tries, and fails, to beat his addictions. Even more terrible to Charlotte was that it brought home to her her failings in Branwell’s last months and weeks. She had not stood by Branwell in the way that Anne and Emily had, and now it was too late. The book was too painful for her to read, and the thought of others reading it and passing judgement, unwittingly, on both Branwell and her was also too painful to contemplate. It was for this reason above all others that Charlotte had The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall suppressed.

Charlotte’s judgement on the book and upon Anne Brontë was all wrong. Writing the book did not do Anne Brontë harm, she was not the frail thing her sister always pictured. She was a strong woman with a burning desire to tell the truth by holding a mirror up to society’s failings. That is why The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall is more relevant today than it has ever been, and as loved today as it has ever been. It is a book that has overcome misunderstanding, contempt, suppression. Its time is now.

As you may know, in the last few weeks this Anne Brontë website changed to a new hosting company, meaning that I’m having to upload the hundred plus previous posts one at a time – don’t worry, it will be fully stocked again soon! For this reason, some of the events mentioned in the posts may be out of date – as in this post. I’m afraid you’ve missed Gregg Wallace and John Torode rushing around Haworth, but as Masterchef has now returned to our screens I thought it a fine time to put this post in the public domain again. I hope you enjoy it!

If you didn’t already know, Celebrity Masterchef has reached the semi-final stage, and tonight it’s coming from Brontë country!

The show sees eight celebrities battle towards a place in the final. Stars as diverse as Sid Owen, Louise Minchin, Tommy Cannon and Reverend Richard Coles will be battling it out, and tonight they’re going to be cooking up a storm in Haworth.

It’s very appropriate that they should be in Haworth this year, of course, as it’s the 200^th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë‘s birth and the beginning of a four year ‘Brontë 200’ period that will also witness the bicentenaries of Emily and Anne Brontë.

It’s already one of my favourite television shows, and from what I’ve seen tonight’s show should be particularly exciting for Brontë fans. The celebrities will be walking up Haworth’s steep, cobbled Main Street before heading out onto the moors to cook up a feast for guests dressed in 1840s attire.

I’m sure the results will be Celebrity Masterchef’s usual mix of the incredible and the inedible, but what do we know about the cooking and dining habits of the Brontës themselves?

Mrs. Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, said that they ate little meat, but this erroneous tale came from a servant who had been dismissed by Patrick Brontë and so had a grudge to bear against him. Potatoes were a staple of the diet in the Parsonage, and as this was sheep farming country mutton was a regular addition.

In the diary paper of 24^th November 1834, the earliest we have, Emily and Anne Brontë paint a picture of domestic life in the Parsonage on that day. Emily writes (with the haphazard spelling typical of her then): ‘we are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef Turnips, potato’s and applepudding the kitchin is in a very untidy state’. She also says that she is peeling apples, and that family servant Tabby Aykroyd later makes her peel potatoes, as Charlotte is making an apple pudding: ‘Charlotte said that she made puddings perfectly and was of a quick but limted intellect.’

We can guess that Charlotte was talking about Tabby here, rather than making such a judgement about herself.

Charlotte was not particularly skilled at cooking or baking. In August 1846 she was lodging temporarily in Manchester with her father, as he recovered from cataract surgery. On 21^st August she wrote to Ellen explaining that one of her greatest difficulties was that she ‘was somewhat puzzled in managing about provisions.’

Emily, on the other hand, turned out to be something of a domestic goddess. As Tabby became older and less mobile, as the result of a slip on the icy Haworth street that broke her leg and left her with a permanent limp, Emily took over many of the cooking and baking duties. She became famed for the quality of the bread that she made, and people said that it was the best in the village. Haworth stationer John Greenwood, who knew the family well, said that Emily could often be found: ‘in the kitchen baking bread at which she had such a dainty hand.’

We’ll see at 8pm on BBC One whether the celebrities have as much of a dainty hand. I just hope that we don’t see a windswept Cathy coming over the moors and shouting ‘Rickaay’ instead of Heathcliff! Talking of television, I myself am appearing on BBC Two at 8.30 on Monday as a contestant on the quiz show Only Connect. Alas, there were no Brontë questions!

Anne Brontë’s masterpiece ‘The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall’ is perfectly suited to the little or big screen, with its dramatic scenes, characters you can’t help but care for, romantic intrigue, and a classic villain on the fast road to self-destruction. And as I found out when I watched a 1996 version over the last week, the BBC have really done it proud.

The first thing to say is that it is an immaculate production: the cinematography and lighting are superb, and the theme music is really haunting as well. Thankfully, unlike some modern shows we can all think, there is also a complete absence of the mumbling that has blighted many recent dramas. It’s a very fresh looking production, and it’s hard to think that it is actually now twenty years old.

The casting is perfect too. In the title role of Helen is Tara Fitzgerald, probably known to many viewers now for her recent runs in Game Of Thrones and Silent Witness, but an actress I’ve loved ever since her early film appearances in Hear My Song and the great Brassed Off. She has the perfect combination of frailty and hardness, naivety and experience, and it’s easy to see why both Huntingdon and Markham fall in love with her.

Toby Stephens plays Gilbert Markham, which can make Brontë fans do a double take as he was later to be a superb Rochester in an excellent BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre. I was particularly impressed by his Yorkshire accent, although it was noticeable that this television adaptation played down the bumbling fool aspect of his character that was emphasised by Anne.

The villain of the piece is of course Arthur Huntingdon, played by Rupert Graves. Once again, I think he is an excellent choice. He oozes menace and selfishness throughout, and this adaptation doesn’t shy away from showing his violent, abusive nature.

All in all, this is pleasingly faithful to Anne Brontë’s wonderful storyline, with one major difference. Towards the end of the novel, Markham comes to the misunderstanding that Helen is marrying someone else, and he rushes to see her but finding her at a wedding feels that he has arrived too late. In this adaptation, however, the roles are reversed. Helen returns to Wildfell and sees Markham at a wedding, becoming distraught at the thought that she has missed out on a chance of true love. The ending is the same, however, as the misunderstanding is revealed.

It also misses two of my favourite scenes from a novel that is full of them: Helen’s admission that ‘It is not enough to say that I no longer love my husband – I HATE him! I hate him – I hate him! But God have mercy on his miserable soul.’ Also absent is the beautifully tender scene near the end when Markham and Helen finally declare their love for one another. She reaches out of the window and plucks a snow covered rose: ‘This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals – will you have it?’

I will certainly have this BBC adaptation as an annual viewing treat from now on, it was a thoroughly enjoyable serial that I think Anne Brontë would have approved of and been proud of. It even transposes a scene from Agnes Grey into the story, with young Arthur maltreating a bird. I bought it at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, but you can also pick up a copy on Amazon. I do wish the BBC would also make an Agnes Grey adaptation, but I am looking forward to seeing their new Brontë drama coming later this year. They’re building a complete replica of the Brontë Parsonage and the parish church on the moors beyond Haworth. Here’s a picture of how it’s coming along, and I await its progress with interest.

Anne Brontë was just a baby when her mother Maria died, with her Aunt Branwell and her older sisters Maria and Charlotte becoming mother figures to her. There were two more women in the young Anne’s life however, and although they may not have been in regular contact they still played a significant part in her life: Anne Brontë’s godmothers, Elizabeth Firth and Fanny Outhwaite.

When Reverend Patrick Brontë moved to his new parish of Thornton, near Bradford, in May 1815 he had a wife and two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, over the course of his nearly five years in the parish he would have four more children – Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily and Anne.

Thornton, like their next parish of Haworth, wasn’t a straightforward parish – most of the inhabitants preferred the non-conformist Methodist and Baptist churches to the official Church of England, and resented having to pay taxes to the official church as they were then made to do.

One Thornton family, however, made the Brontës very welcome – the Firths. The Firth family were the undoubted leaders of Thornton society, and lived at the imposing Kipping House to the south of the village, with a view looking over the moors (that’s a picture of Kipping House today at the top of this post).

By May 1815 there were only two Firths living there: John Scholefield Firth and his daughter Elizabeth, then aged eighteen. Mrs. Firth, also named Elizabeth, had died in a tragic accident a year earlier when she was thrown from a horse outside her home. John Firth was a doctor, but a man of considerable means, and he was a staunch supporter of the Church of England.

He saw it as a source of pride to regularly host the parish priest and his family, aided by his teenage daughter Elizabeth and from 1815 onwards his second wife Anne Greame.. Elizabeth Firth is of particular importance to Brontë lovers and researchers, because from the age of fifteen she kept a diary, detailing her daily activities. Many of them may seem mundane, for example one of her first entries is from 7^th January 1812: ‘Miss Outhwaite went home’. From 1815 onwards however her diary becomes full of the Brontës: for example on 6^th November 1817: ‘I went to Bradford with Mr Brontë. The Princess Charlotte of Wales died.’

The diary doesn’t go into too much detail, but it shows the vast social intercourse between the Firth and Brontë family. She also volunteered as a teacher at Patrick’s Thornton Sunday school. One mark of the respect that Patrick, and his wife Maria, had for Elizabeth Firth is that they asked her to be godmother to their daughter Anne.

Although the Brontë family moved to Haworth shortly after Anne’s birth, they did keep in touch with Elizabeth Firth. We know that she visited Maria Brontë in Haworth during her long terminal illness, and that she took the elder Brontë children back to Kipping House with her for a while. By this time, Elizabeth had become mistress of the house, as her father died suddenly in late 1820, with Reverend Patrick Brontë by his side.

Elizabeth was now a relatively wealthy young woman, and three months after Maria Bronte’s death, Patrick visited her at Thornton. After his return to Haworth he wrote Elizabeth a letter proposing marriage. She rejected his proposal, and may have been angered by it as her diary records on 14^th December 1821 that she had sent ‘my last letter to Mr Brontë’. Why was she angry? It may have been the age difference, at 24 she was twenty years younger than him, or it could have been the difference in social standing between them. She may have found his courtship unseemly so soon after the death of his wife. There was also the fact that she had her heart set on another, and she later married Reverend Franks of Huddersfield.

The break between Elizabeth and Patrick didn’t last long, and by 1823 they were reconciled, with Patrick visiting her in Thornton again.

The young woman mentioned in Elizabeth’s 1812 diary entry, Miss Outhwaite, also features heavily within them. Fanny Outhwaite had met Elizabeth at the exclusive Crofton Hall school near Wakefield, and they soon became best friends.
Fanny Outhwaite too was the daughter of a surgeon, Dr. Thomas Outhwaite. As a frequent visitor to Kipping House from her Bradford home, Fanny came into regular contact with the Brontës, and thus it was that in 1820 Patrick asked her to join Elizabeth as godmother to Anne Brontë.

The choice of these two young women as Anne’s godmothers showed that they were looked on approvingly from a moral point of view, but it was also a practical choice. They were both women who had considerably more money than most in the Brontë circle, and it seems likely it was hoped that they could make a financial as well as spiritual contribution to Anne’s life. They didn’t disappoint.

Patrick Brontë spent large sums of money on medical care, fruitless though it was for his dying wife, and ran up significant debts in the process. Elizabeth and Fanny were among the friends who cleared his debts. They made further contributions throughout the lives of all the Brontës, regularly sending them gifts. Elizabeth paid for the eldest Brontë daughters to attend Crofton Hall School, where she and Fanny had met, but they were there for just a term, Patrick seemingly realising that it would not do to ask Elizabeth to fund their whole school careers.

It was this that led to the fateful decision to send the Brontë girls to the much more affordable Cowan Bridge School, and Elizabeth Franks, as she then was, and her husband visited Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte there in 1824.

Elizabeth and her husband lived close to Roe Head School, and in the summer of 1836 they invited Charlotte and Anne to spend the summer with them. The girls did this under duress, as they would much have preferred to be back at home in Haworth with Emily and Branwell. It was to be one of the last times that Anne would see her godmother, as in September 1837 she died at the home of the Outhwaites. A local newspaper reported that she died after ‘a protracted indisposition’, and so it may have been that she was being treated by Dr. Outhwaite.

Fanny Outhwaite herself died at the beginning of 1849. She too had remained in some sort of contact with the Brontes, and we know that Patrick visited her in June 1836 after she had broken her arm. She did not forget her goddaughter, and in her will she left Anne the sum of two hundred pounds: in that time a very substantial amount of money.

By that time, however, Anne Brontë too was dying. The legacy from her godmother allowed Anne to pay for her final trip to Scarborough, the resort that she loved and which was to witness her last breath on 29^th May, 1849.

Patrick and Maria had made a good choice of godmothers for Anne. They were kind and caring, and provided financial support when needed throughout their lives, even if they couldn’t always be with her as much as they would have liked. Anne was a prodigious letter writer, even though only a handful remain, so it seems likely to me that she would have kept in correspondence with her godmothers. Maybe this is why Fanny Outhwaite remembered Anne so fulsomely in her will? Alas, any such letters have been lost to time. Elizabeth Firth’s diaries however have been preserved, and are now in the Sheffield University archives. A transcription of the diaries can also be read online right here, and they’re a useful and fascinating resource for Brontë lovers, as well as a fascinating glimpse into social history.