The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family

by Juliet Barker

Juliet Barker is an internationally recognised expert on the Brontës

she was curator and librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth from 1983 to 1989.

Her revolutionary and prize-winning biography The Brontës was the result of eleven years’ research in archives throughout the world. Her ability to combine ground-breaking scholarly research with a highly readable and accessible style has made her a bestselling literary biographer

‘Ruthlessly meticulous revisionist history’ Hermione Lee, Sunday Times

‘A contribution of enormous value to future generations’ Lucasta Miller, Independent

It was a revolutionary book when it was first published in 1994 and since then it has become the standard biography of this extraordinary family.

Despite this, popular myths about the Brontës have proved astonishingly difficult to quash. It was therefore important to me not only that my biography should remain in print but also that it should be revised and updated so that it could not be undermined by failing to take into account the huge advances in Brontë studies which have taken place since 1994.

For the convenience of all readers, new and old, I have changed all my references to these new editions and (occasionally) accepted their new readings.

a touching letter to the same bishop from the newly bereaved Patrick, who had just lost his sixth and last child.

for undertaking research on my behalf in an effort to identify Branwell’s illegitimate child.

The now famous Brontë name was spelt and accented in a variety of ways in the family’s lifetime. Though I have adopted a standard ‘Brontë’ throughout my own text,

Similarly, because I believe that the policy of ‘correcting’ the Brontës’ often wildly ill-spelt and ungrammatical writings gives a false impression of their sophistication, particularly in the juvenilia, I have chosen to transcribe my quotations from the original manuscripts ‘warts and all’.

although I have tried to let the Brontës speak for themselves, whenever the sense has absolutely demanded it I have made editorial insertions in square brackets thus

Yet another biography of the Brontës requires an apology, or at least an explanation. Their lives have been written so many times that there ought to be nothing left to say. Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, published within two years of her subject’s death, set a new standard in literary biography and is still widely read.

The Brontës’ lives and works have been taken apart and reassembled according to theories of varying degrees of sanity by literally hundreds of other biographers and literary critics. What is surprising is that, despite so much activity, the basic ideas about the Brontës’ lives have remained unchanged. Charlotte is portrayed as the long-suffering victim of duty, subordinating her career as a writer to the demands of her selfish and autocratic father; Emily is the wild child of genius, deeply misanthropic yet full of compassion for her errant brother; Anne is the quiet, conventional one who, lacking her sisters’ rebellious spirit, conforms to the demands of society and religion. The men in their lives have suffered an even worse fate, blamed first of all by Mrs Gaskell, and since then by feminists, for holding the Brontë sisters back from achieving literary success and even, at times, for simply existing. Patrick is universally depicted as cold, austere and remote, yet given to uncontrollable rages, alternately neglecting and tyrannizing his children. Branwell is a selfish braggart, subordinating his sisters’ lives to his own by right of his masculinity, and negating the value of this sacrifice by squandering his talent and the family’s money on drink and drugs. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who cannot be portrayed as either mad or bad, is simply dull. These stereotypes have been reinforced by the practice of writing separate biographies for each member of the family. Yet the most r...

Though many have tried, it is impossible to write an authoritative biography of either of the two youngest Brontë sisters. The known facts of their lives could be written on a single sheet of paper; their letters, diary papers and drawings would not fill two dozen.

In this biography I have deliberately chosen to write about the whole Brontë family, hoping that this will redress the balance and enable the reader to see the Brontës as they lived, not in isolation, but as a tightly knit group.

The Brontë story has always been riddled with myths. Charlotte herself started the process in an attempt to explain why her sisters had written novels which had both shocked and titillated the literary critics. Mrs Gaskell ably extended this argument to Charlotte herself, producing in her Life of Charlotte Brontë a persuasive and powerful polemic which has never been seriously challenged. Instead of being writers of ‘naughty books’, who revelled in vulgarity and brutality, the Brontës thus became graduates of the school of adversity, writing in all innocence about the barbarous society in which they lived because that was all they knew. Their work took on a new, moral quality: that of Truth. However distasteful Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might be, they were simply an accurate representation of provincial life. A bizarre offshoot of this argument is the belief that every one of the Brontës’ fictional creations must have had its counterpart in reality.

scotch the myth that Haworth was a remote and obscure village where nothing ever happened. It was a township, a small, industrial town in the heart of a much larger chapelry where politics and religion were hotly disputed and culture thrived. As a leading figure in Haworth, whose activities were constantly recorded and whose letters were regularly published, Patrick emerges as a tireless campaigner and reformer, a man of liberal beliefs rather than the rampant Tory he is so often labelled.

I sincerely hope that this biography will sweep away the many myths which have clung to the Brontës for so long. They are no longer necessary. Unlike their contemporaries, we can value their work without being outraged or even surprised by the directness of the language and the brutality of the characters.

Charlotte Brontë: ‘This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.’

It is difficult now to appreciate the full extent of Patrick’s achievement in getting to Cambridge. To be Irish in an almost exclusively English university was in itself unusual, but what made him virtually unique was that he was also poor and of humble birth.

Hugh Brontë may have been only a ‘poor farmer’ but he was not the impoverished peasant of Brontë legend.

It is a further indication of the fact that the Brontës were not in desperate financial straits that Patrick escaped the customary fate of the eldest child in a large family. Instead of being put to work on his father’s farm or apprenticed out so that he could make a contribution to the family income, he was allowed to remain at school much longer than was usual at the time.

Given the scarcity of written records in Ireland at this time, it is all the more remarkable that there is confirmation of Patrick’s startling claim to have established his own school at the age of only sixteen. In November 1793, when Patrick was indeed sixteen, John Lindsay of Bangrove, Rathfriland, recorded the payment of one pound to ‘Pat Prunty for David’s school bill’ in his account book.13 Nothing else is known about Patrick’s school, not even its precise location, though the fact that it must have catered for the sons of the gentry, rather than village children, is indicated by the size of the fee charged and by David Lindsay’s subsequent appointment as an officer in the local militia.14 If this was the case, then Patrick must have been able to offer more than the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic to his young pupils. Whether he was self-taught or whether his evident talents had already attracted the attention of local clergymen, who alone were in the position to give him higher education, is not known.

On the surface, Patrick’s decision to exchange the independence of keeping his own school for the comparatively humble role of tutor in a gentleman’s family is surprising.

the second son, William, was himself a United Irishman. He joined the rebels

He was equally fervent in denouncing rebellion, which suggests that this first-hand experience of popular revolt left him deeply scarred. For the rest of his life, his political opinions would be swayed by his fear of revolution, even to the point of aligning him with the Tory party which, in many other respects, was not his natural allegiance.

taking up the appointment as tutor to the children of Thomas Tighe, he had publicly distanced himself from his brother and his brother’s cause and declared his own allegiance to the establishment.

he must have known Patrick almost from birth and had had plenty of opportunity to observe his character and his single-minded pursuit of an education. His decisive intervention at such a late stage in Patrick’s career, when the young man was already twenty-one, suggests that, for whatever reason, he saw the need to redirect his energies: undoubtedly, too, he had recognized in Patrick a potential recruit for the ministry of his church.

Because the Evangelicals placed great emphasis on the Bible, their ministers were particularly enthusiastic about the need for education and literacy among their congregations, promoting Sunday schools, holding ‘cottage meetings’ and producing simple, didactic pamphlets. This was a faith that demanded a missionary zeal in its ministers; there was simply no place for the idle or the half-hearted.

In the long term, Tighe’s Evangelical sympathies were to be far more important to Patrick than his political and social connections. They were to be the inspiration for the whole of his future career. It has often been suggested that Patrick’s choice of the Church was dictated by worldly ambition: the Church or the army, it is argued, were the only means by which talented but poor young men could seek to better themselves. This is singularly unfair to Patrick. Though his ambition cannot be doubted, neither can his personal faith. His writings and his activities are eloquent testimony to the sincerity of his belief, and the fact that he entered the ministry under the aegis of the Evangelicals is further proof of his commitment. By doing so he was effectively curtailing his chances of future promotion,

Had Patrick been ambitious for temporal, rather than spiritual glory, he had enlisted under the wrong banner.

There were considerable difficulties to overcome if Patrick was to reach his goal of ordination, not the least being that he could not become a clergyman unless he graduated from one of the universities. To do that, he had first to be proficient in Latin and Greek. As these were not on the syllabus of the ordinary village school in Ireland, it seems likely that Patrick was instructed in the Classics by Thomas Tighe, perhaps in part-payment for his services as a tutor to the family. Interestingly, the story was current as early as 1855 that Patrick adopted the ‘Bronte’ spelling of his surname in response to pressure from Thomas Tighe, who disliked the plebeian ‘Brunty’ and thought the Greek word for thunder a more appropriate and resonant version of the name.24

St John’s was renowned for its Evangelical connections and, perhaps most important of all as far as Patrick was concerned, it had the largest funds available of any college in any of the universities for assisting poor but able young men to get a university education.

No doubt he suffered from the snobbery and elitism of some of his contemporaries but, on the other hand, he did not pass unnoticed. At the very least, the unorthodox and rather romantic circumstances of his arrival at Cambridge made an impression and within a couple of years he was already a legend at the college.

The fact that Patrick was now joining the majority of St John’s undergraduates in working towards a career in the Church did not prevent him or them, from taking part in the more secular activities of the university. Most prominent among these were the preparations for an invasion of England by the French which, after the renewal of hostilities by Napoleon and the declaration of war by Great Britain on 18 May 1803, seemed a daily possibility. Throughout the summer of 1803 Napoleon was putting together an invasion flotilla and restructuring the defences of his Channel ports. Volunteers were called for and by December 1803, 463,000 men had enrolled in the local militia of the three kingdoms. Among them was Patrick Brontë, who had a lifelong passion for all things military.53 By September of that year the gentlemen of the university had obtained leave to drill as a separate volunteer corps from the men of the town. The following month, the heads of colleges and tutors gave reluctant permission for all lay members of the university to be allowed one hour a day for military drill, on condition that none of the officers were to be gazetted so as to be called up into the regular army; those who were already ordained were, of course, excluded from taking any active part in the drilling.54

For the rest of his life Patrick was to be inordinately proud of the fact that he had drilled under Lord Palmerston, not least because by 1809, when he was still only a humble curate, Palmerston had been appointed Minister for War, and was already embarking on a long political career which was to make him an outstanding foreign secretary and prime minister.

The country continued in a state of constant alarms and invasion scares throughout Patrick’s remaining years at Cambridge and, indeed, for many more years to come.

Patrick did not, apparently, proceed to an Honours degree, which suggests that, at this final hurdle, he failed to reach the required standard.

St John’s gave him the customary four pounds for obtaining his degree and Patrick, in a moment of uncharacteristic profligacy, celebrated by buying a copy of Walter Scott’s newly published The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He proudly inscribed it ‘P. Brontē. B.A. St John’s College, Cambridge –’ and carefully put it into his tiny collection of books.64

By 28 June Patrick had a sworn document from Joseph Jowett, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, appointing him his curate in the parish of Wethersfield in Essex at a salary of £60 a year.68 Having secured his first curacy,

In four years he had come a very long way from his humble origins in Ireland. His degree had made him a gentleman, his ordination would make him a clergyman; his future lay in his own hands, make of it what he would.

regrets. Though he retained a sentimental attachment to the land of his birth, his contacts with his relatives were to be few and far between and confined principally to the sending of occasional sums of money.76 He never expressed any wish to return to Ireland and did not inspire any curiosity in his children to seek out their father’s relatives or his first home.77 Patrick had plainly seen that his future lay in England and he was eager to take up his first curacy there.

This was to be a decisive factor in one of the most important decisions of Patrick’s life.

The curacy of Wethersfield was hardly a place for a man to make his mark; it was a pleasant and gentle way of breaking Patrick into his new career but he was ambitious, a man with a mission to convert and to minister, so he must have found his position, cut off from the mainstream of Evangelical activity in the depths of Essex, increasingly frustrating.

He was finally ordained as a priest on 21 December 1807 in the splendid surroundings of the Chapel Royal of St James, Westminster.95 Patrick was now in a position to be looking actively for promotion to his own parish but, at this moment, he had little incentive to do so. He had fallen in love with the young daughter of a local farmer and was intent on marrying her. Mary Mildred Davy Burder96 was the niece of the lady with whom Patrick lodged. The eldest of four children, she was eighteen years old, twelve years younger than Patrick; she lived with her mother, brothers and sister at a large farm, known as The Broad, just a mile across the fields from St George’s House, halfway between Wethersfield and Finchingfield. Her father had died shortly before Patrick’s arrival and her uncle, Mr Burder’s brother, who lived at nearby Great Yeldham, had assumed responsibility for the family. According to Mary’s daughter,97 Mary met Patrick when she was sent with a present of game to her aunt’s house. She was in the kitchen, preparing it for dinner, when Patrick walked in. She was pretty and lively, and there was an instant and mutual attraction. The ‘errands and messages to “Aunt Davy’” became more frequent and Patrick returned her visits, walking with her round the woods to The Broad. Some fifteen years later, Patrick was still to remember her as ‘affectionate, kind, and forgiving, agreeable in person, and still more agreeable in mind’.98 They shared an interest in books and Patrick ...

Nor was it true that Patrick’s letters to Mary were intercepted and destroyed:

She had, therefore, not only received and kept his letters but also she or Miss Davy had continued to receive them for a full two years after Patrick had left Wethersfield.

They evidently made Mary deeply bitter, which suggests that Patrick, rather than her family, had been the cause of the breach of the engagement.