Anne Brontë

English · 1820 to 1849

Born on January 17, 1820, in Thornton, Yorkshire, the youngest of the six children of an Anglican curate, Bronte was barely a year old when her mother died and the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth. She was raised largely by her aunt Elizabeth Branwell, and was closest to Emily, with whom she invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal and kept up its chronicles well into adulthood. Where her sisters found employment unbearable, Anne endured it: after a first post at Blake Hall ended in dismissal, she spent nearly five years as governess to the Robinson family at Thorp Green, the longest any of the siblings held a job, and she was still there when her brother Branwell arrived as tutor, began an affair with his employer's wife, and was thrown out in disgrace. Anne resigned and went home to watch him disintegrate. In 1846 the three sisters published a volume of poems as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; it sold two copies. Agnes Grey (1847) drew directly on the governess years, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) went further than any novel of its decade dared, following a woman who takes her child and runs from an alcoholic husband. It sold out in six weeks and was condemned as coarse; Charlotte, who thought its subject an entire mistake, blocked its republication after Anne's death, and the book waited most of a century to be read on its own terms. Anne caught tuberculosis while nursing Emily through it, and asked to be taken to Scarborough in the hope that the sea air would help. She died there on May 28, 1849, aged twenty-nine, four days after arriving, the only Bronte buried away from Haworth. Her last words were to Charlotte, telling her to take courage.