Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë (born January 17, 1820, Thornton, Yorkshire, England—died May 28, 1849, Scarborough, Yorkshire) was an English poet and novelist, sister of the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and author of the novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

The youngest of six children of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, Anne was taught in the family’s Haworth home and at Roe Head School. With her sister Emily, she invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, about which they wrote verse and prose (the latter now lost) from the early 1830s until 1845. She took a position as a governess briefly in 1839 and then again for four years, 1841–45, with the Robinsons, the family of a clergyman, at Thorpe Green, near York. There her brother, Branwell, joined her in 1843, intending to serve as a tutor. Anne returned home in 1845 and was followed shortly by her brother, who had been dismissed, charged with making love to his employer’s wife.

In 1846 Anne contributed 21 poems to Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, a joint work with her sisters Charlotte and Emily that they self-published. Because of the prejudice at the time against women authors, the sisters each chose a masculine pen name that matched the initials of their real names. The collection sold two copies.

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Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published together with Emily’s Wuthering Heights in three volumes (of which Agnes Grey was the third) in December 1847. The reception to these volumes, associated in the public mind with the immense popularity of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (October 1847), led to quick publication of Anne’s second novel (again as Acton Bell), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in three volumes in June 1848; it sold well. She fell ill with tuberculosis toward the end of the year and died the following May.

Her novel Agnes Grey, probably begun at Thorpe Green, records with limpidity and some humor the life of a governess. The Irish novelist George Moore called it “simple and beautiful as a muslin dress.” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall presents an unsoftened picture of the debauchery and degradation of the heroine’s first husband and sets against it the Arminian belief, opposed to Calvinist predestination, that no soul shall be ultimately lost. The author’s outspokenness raised some scandal, and Charlotte deplored the subject as morbid and out of keeping with her sister’s nature, but the vigorous writing indicates that Anne found in it not only a moral obligation but also an opportunity of artistic development.