The forgotten Brontë sister

To mark Anne Brontë’s 200th birthday, Charlotte Cory looks back at the life and works of this ‘runt of the literary litter’ and finds she was by no means meek and mild

- Charlotte Cory

PITY poor Anne Brontë, the youngest, overshadowed and least read of the Brontë sisters. Regarded rather as the runt of the literary litter, Anne, like the last born in many large families, has always needed to elbow her siblings aside for the attention that is her due. It is her fate that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, one of the first great feminist novels, is inevitably shelved alongside Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, two of the greatest novels ever written.

Anne was born on January 17, 1820, the sixth and final child of her Cornish mother, Maria Branwell, and Irish father, the Rev Patrick Brontë. A year later, Mrs Brontë became ill and took seven painful months to die, during which the six little Brontës huddled together downstairs, making no noise. Her despairing last words—‘Oh God, my poor children’— rang out through the quiet house although, throughout her illness, she had hardly seen them. As the first Brontë biographer, Mrs Gaskell, recounted, ‘the sight of them, knowing they would soon be motherless, would have agitated her too much’.

The problem of caring for the orphaned flock was solved when Mrs Brontë’s elder sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Cornwall to take charge of the household. Appalled by the Yorkshire weather, Aunt Branwell shut herself away in her room with the asthmatic, delicate baby Anne. She bolted the window, had a fire constantly burning and only left the parsonage on Sundays, to hurry across the churchyard and sit in the front pew of the church to listen to her brother-in-law preach.

Anne was four years old when her four elder sisters went away to the school for clergymen’s daughters, made infamous in Jane Eyre, and five when they returned, the two older ones to die and join their mother in the graveyard visible through the parsonage windows.