The Brontë 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 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 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. 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. Charlotte died at 38 in 1855 after a short illness. She had married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, less than a year before.

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.

See also

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• UK topics
• Brontë Country

The girls were sent to be educated in Lancashire where they were so badly treated their father had them brought home to Haworth.

Further reading

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• The Brontës, Juliet Barker, 1995
• The Art of the Brontës, Christine Alexander, 1994

External links

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• Website of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth
• Web news magazine of the Brontë Parsonage Museum
• News and information about the Brontës using a blog format.
• Bronte Sisters Links (the biggest collection of links regarding the Bronte Sisters!)
• Brontëana: Brontë Studies Weblog

Brontë family | English writers

Geschwister Brontë | Sorelle Brontë | האחיות ברונטה | Brontë | 勃朗特