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The Brontë Sisters (prounounced BRon-tay) were English novelists of the 1840s and 1850s.

 Charlotte (born April 21, 1816)

Emily (born July 30, 1818)

Anne (born January 17, 1820)

Their brother Patrick Branwell Brontë (26 June 1817 – 24 September 1848) was a painter and poet.

The children’s father was a clergyman, Reverend Patrick Brontë, born in County Down, Ireland in 1777.

 The three sisters grew up in Haworth, near Keighley (pronounced Keith-lee) in West 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 nearby Cowan Bridge.

The following year, the two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, became ill, left the school and died. Charlotte and Emily were brought home to be educated with their brother.

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.

The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year, some of the most remarkable novels of the early Victorian period.

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after their 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 in 1848 before she could complete another novel.

Their brother Branwell also died in that year.

Anne published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in 1848, a year before her untimely death in 1849.

Upon publication in 1847, 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 after her death,  in 1857. Her fragment, Emma, was published in 1860. Some of her juvenile writings have become available for the first time only in the past decade or so.

Unlike her sisters, Charlotte married. She wed her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854, but died after a brief illness marriage in 1855 after a short illness, at the age of only 38. 

The first biography of Charlotte was written by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, and published in 1857. It helped create the myth of a doomed family living in romantic solitude on the wild (and unhealthy!) Yorkshire Moors.

In this area, we will be exploring the remarkable novels by this unique trio of talented sisters.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:55 am and is filed under The Brontes, 19th Century. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.