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.
Denne historien er fra January 15, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra January 15, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
