ADSactly Literature - Runs in the Family - The Story of the Bronte Sisters (Part 1)

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Surely, this image of children playing together on the English moors and telling stories and making up adventures in nature sounds all very bohemian, but the Brontes’ childhoods were deeply blighted by deaths and sadness. First, came the death of their mother, Maria, when the children were very young. She died at the relatively young (at least, by our judgment) age of thirty-eight, from uterine cancer, leaving behind a husband, Patrick and no less than six children. However, not all would reach maturity.

Four years after Maria’s untimely death, the family was shaken by tragedy again, when the oldest daughters of the family, Elizabeth and Maria, succumbed to tuberculosis and died within weeks of each other, Maria at age 11 and Elizabeth at only 10 years old.
And while the young Bronte girls, Emily and Anne, admittedly had been too young to remember their mother well, or indeed, her death, they definitely remembered the deaths of their two sisters.

It seems a tragedy to think that all the surviving Bronte children would eventually die of tuberculosis, as well. Certainly, a disease that haunted the Bronte family.

After the two girls died in 1825, it was believed that they had contracted the disease due to the poor living conditions at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where all the girls (except for Anne, who was too young) had been enrolled the year before. Fearing for Charlotte and Emily’s lives, Patrick Bronte pulled the girls out of school and from then on, he was the one who oversaw their education.

This school would later be immortalized in Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’, as Lowood Institution. A school for poor, orphaned girls, Lowood reflects the harsh treatment the Brontes endured at Cowan Bridge and the tyrannical characters of Mr. Brocklehurst (the headmaster) and Miss Scatcherd was actually based on the people in charge of the school.
Interesting to note, the death of Jane Eyre’s only friend, an older girl called Helen Burns, closely resembles the death of Charlotte’s oldest sister, Maria.

Later, at age 14, Charlotte would be sent as a pupil to the school of Miss Wooler, where she would later become a teacher. Emily and Anne also followed their older sister there.

And from here on, I find it only appropriate to look at the three sisters individually, but before we do, I would like to add a word about Branwell Bronte, who, even though greatly outdone by his sisters, was a writer and painter also.

_{Self-portrait of Branwell Bronte Image}

However, Branwell found it hard to decide on one specific job and drifted from one thing to another, during his lifetime. He faced rejection from the artistic world, which prompted his drinking (worsened, it’s believed, by an affair with a married woman). Branwell fell into serious alcohol problems and died of tuberculosis (probably worsened by his substance abuse) at the age of 31.

Branwell painted the most well-known picture of the Bronte sisters, which, in the beginning featured his image also. However, Branwell grew displeased with the image and painted himself out, leaving only the three Bronte sisters.

1. Charlotte Bronte

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The oldest of the three surviving Bronte girls and also, the first one to enjoy literary success, Charlotte Bronte’s youth was largely unhappy. First, working as a teacher at Miss Wooler left her feeling alone and alienated. She didn’t enjoy her work and didn’t really like the children she was teaching to. She also saw little literary success at first, even receiving the following discouraging advice from Poet Laurate Robert Southey:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation.

Charlotte didn’t listen to the advice (and thank goodness she didn’t), but it was still rather dispiriting. Later, she worked as a governess, which she disliked even more.
However, all these experiences would prove to be worthwhile, since they inspired the events of her most acclaimed novel, Jane Eyre, about an honest and rather plain young governess who falls into various misfortunes.

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With the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847, Charlotte’s life changed by quite a bit. The novel was an immediate success (a grim parallel to the fate of her first novel, The Professor, which was sadly rejected and only saw the light posthumously). The sisters were soon accepted and revered in literary circles.

Jane Eyre was regarded as highly controversial at the time, both because of the events of the book itself, and also because of the first-person female perspective of the writing (which she would later use in Villette).

Charlotte’s personal life was also a great source of inspiration. As a young woman, she attended the Belgian boarding school headed by Constantin Heger, a married man Charlotte is believed to have been in love with and who, very likely, inspired Mr Rochester and the character of Paul Emanuel in Villette).

Charlotte Bronte eventually married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. It’s interesting to note that the Bronte sisters used the male pen-names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and they took the surname from Arthur Bell Nicholls himself.
Charlotte seemed to have a happy, though short, married life. However, she became pregnant soon after the wedding and even though the official cause of her death was tuberculosis, there are many who believe she was suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum (excessive morning sickness) and that may have led to her untimely demise.

She died aged thirty-eight, in 1855, the last of the original Bronte clan (both her sisters and her brother had died within a year of each other in 1848-9).

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Given that the subject is an extremely rich one, I thought it best to split this story in two. The next installment will try to shed a bit of light on the lives of Anne and Emily Bronte.

So, who's your favorite Bronte? Do tell us about her in the comments!

Authored by: @honeydue

References: Wikipedia

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