Brontë

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The Brontë sisters, painted by their brother, Branwell c. 1834. From left to right, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte (there still remains a shadow of Branwell, which appeared after he painted himself out).

The Brontë (IPA: /ˈbrɒntɪ/) sisters—Charlotte (born April 21, 1816), Emily (born July 30, 1818), and Anne (born January 17, 1820)—were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature.

They were the daughters of Reverend Patrick Brontë, born in County Down, Ireland in 1777, Gaelic name, Padraig mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh. The name translates literally to Patrick, son of the man whose first name is Áed (fire in Gaelic), grandson of the women whose first name is Proinnteach (bestower). The surname mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh was earlier anglicised as 'Prunty' or sometimes 'Brunty'.

After relocating to England, the family conceived of the alternate spelling with the dieresis (commonly mistaken for an umlaut) over the terminal 'e'. In Victorian times, the diacritic was in somewhat more common use in native-English words, such as coöperate and noöne (syn of nobody) to indicate the syllabic nature of a vowel. The dieresis in 'Brontë', therefore, is meant to indicate that the name is of two syllables, and not one.

The three sisters grew up in Haworth, Yorkshire, surviving their mother and two elder sisters into adulthood. In 1824 the four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled as pupils at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge. The following year Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest daughters, became ill, left the school and died; Charlotte and Emily, understandably, were brought home.

They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies, and they returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after a long search to secure publishers. The novels attracted great critical attention and steadily became bestsellers, but the sisters' careers were shortened by ill-health. Emily died the following year before she could complete another novel, and Anne published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in 1848, a year before her death. Upon publication Jane Eyre received the most critical and commercial success of all the Brontë works, continuing to this day. Charlotte's Shirley appeared in 1849 and was followed by Villette in 1853. Her first novel, The Professor, was published posthumously in 1857; her uncompleted fragment, Emma, was published in 1860; and some of her juvenile writings remained unpublished until the late twentieth century. Charlotte died at 38 in 1855 after a short illness. She had married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, less than a year earlier.

The first biography of Charlotte was written by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell and published in 1857, which helped create the mythic status of a doomed family in romantic solitude.

[edit] See also

UK topics
Brontë Country
Brontë Family

[edit] Further reading

Alexander, Christine and Sellars, J. (1995) The art of the Brontës, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43248-0
Barker, Juliet R.V. (1995) The Brontës, London : Phoenix Press, ISBN 1-84212-587-7