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

by Juliet Barker

Patrick may have made up his own mind as to where his duty lay by November 1808 but all the evidence suggests that Mary continued to believe he might marry her. Her references in 1823 to Patrick’s letters of 1809 and 1810 and her insistence that it was the events of ‘the last eleven or twelve years’, rather than the last fifteen, which had placed an ‘insuperable bar’ to any revival of their friendship, point to the fact that it was not until some time after Patrick’s departure from Wethersfield that she realized there was no hope. We know that Patrick had continued to write to her, either personally or through Miss Davy, after he had left Wethersfield. This, and the fact that, when they parted, Patrick assured her that he would return ‘if my circumstances changed for the better’,116 seem to have led Mary to think that their engagement might be renewed, though it does not account for the complete absence of her replies. Perhaps Mary had even expected Patrick to return to claim her as his bride when he had settled in a living and she had reached her majority. It is significant, therefore, that Mary was twenty-one in 1811 or 1812, exactly the period when the breach really occurred. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – this was also the period of Patrick’s wooing of Maria Branwell, so it could be that Mary believed Patrick had actually jilted her to marry someone else. In his own defence, Patrick claimed that he had written twice to Miss Davy from Dewsbury in 1810 and received no...