30 July: The Brontë Sisters

On this date in 1818 Emily Jane Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights was born. 10 things you didn’t know about the Brontë sisters.

1. You’ll have heard of three sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne, and possibly their brother Branwell. There were, however, two more sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. They died of tuberculosis as children. It was Maria’s death which inspired Charlotte’s account of the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre.
2. Their father’s name at birth was Patrick Brunty, born in Loughbrickland, County Down, Ireland. The name is thought to come from the Irish clan Ó Pronntaigh. The clan were hereditary scribes and literary men in Fermanagh. For some reason, Patrick didn’t like his name and decided to change it. It’s thought it was because he wanted to sound less Irish or more distinguished. He might have chosen the name Brontë with a diaeresis (two dots) over the e to indicate that it should be pronounced with two syllables after the Greek word for thunder, or possibly to associate himself with Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was also Duke of Bronté.
3. Their mother was Maria Brontë, née Branwell. She came from Penzance in Cornwall. She died of cancer at the age of 38 in 1821, and her sister Elizabeth came to take care of the children.
4. Patrick Brontë was a clergyman of modest means so finding a school for his children that he could afford wasn’t easy. He eventually sent the four eldest girls to Cowan Bridge, a school for the daughters of clergy, which had been recommended to him. It turned out to be a big mistake. Conditions were poor and the staff mistreated the girls (Lowood in Jane Eyre is based on the school and the treatment of the character Helen Burns is based on the way the eldest sister Maria was treated) but this was where the two eldest sisters contracted tuberculosis and the medical care provided by the director's brother-in-law wasn’t up to scratch. Patrick took his daughters out of the school, but too late for his eldest daughters, who died at home.
5. Later on, Emily and Charlotte went to a school in Brussels, run by Constantin Heger and his wife Claire. Emily didn’t like it much and was quite rebellious, but Charlotte was happy there. After the girls were forced to return home when their aunt died, Charlotte went back to the school afterwards. This may well have been because she had a thing for Constantin Heger. After leaving the school, she wrote to him several times. Heger actually ripped the letters up and threw them in the bin, and it was his wife who rescued them and glued them back together. Constantin’s children eventually gave the letters to the British Museum.
6. The children were interested in writing from an early age and with their brother, created small, matchbox sized books about fictional places - the imaginary African kingdom of Glass Town, the Empire of Angria and Gondal, an island continent in the North Pacific, ruled by a woman (the latter was created by Anne, who went on to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, considered to be one of the first feminist novels). The books, filled with tiny writing, illustrations, maps, landscapes and plans of buildings, and bound together with thread, were made so small as they were intended to be small enough for Branwell’s toy soldiers to read.
7. The sisters were self published authors, at least to begin with. Their first publication, at their own expense, was a book of poems, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846). It sold just two copies, which suggested to the sisters that perhaps they should write novels instead. Emily’s Wuthering Heights was rejected several times so she paid £50 to publish it herself. In due course, they found publishers for their work, but one of them, Thomas Cautley Newby, didn’t believe that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were three different people, so Charlotte and Anne travelled by train to London with the letters addressed to Messrs. Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, to prove him wrong. Emily, said to be painfully shy, had refused to go with them. Once he’d got over the shock of finding that Acton and Currer were actually women, he introduced Charlotte and Anne to his mother, and took them out to the opera.
8. All three worked as teachers and/or governesses, although Emily’s career only lasted six months. Branwell, too, was a tutor for a while. Anne got him a job at the house where she was governess. Branwell was highly intelligent and talented, and went to London to make his name as an artist. However, he got into bad habits there and spent his allowance on drugs and houses of ill-repute. Anne got him the job to help him get back on his feet, but he ended up having an affair with the lady of the house and got himself fired. After that, he spent the rest of his life as an alcoholic and drug addict. Anne and Emily tried their best to help him, but Charlotte hated him.
9. Emily loved to wander in the moors around Haworth, with her Dog, Keeper. According to the writings of a family friend, Emily chose for one of her dresses ‘..a White stuff patterned with lilac thunder and Lightning, to the scarcely concealed horror of her more sober companions.’ Charlotte mentions in her letters that Keeper kept a vigil by Emily’s death bed. Emily only wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights, which some critics at the time felt must have been written by someone quite depraved. It has been suggested that Emily was working on another novel when she died, but Charlotte, embarrassed by the reception Wuthering Heights had had, burned the manuscript.
10. Charlotte was the one who lived longest, and the only one to marry. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls, one of her father’s curates. She didn’t like him much at first. She wrote to her friend that he was rigid, conventional, and rather narrow-minded "like all the curates", and the first time he proposed to her, she turned him down. In the end, he grew on her sufficiently that she changed her mind, and even her father’s (he’d strongly disapproved when Nicholls proposed to her the first time) and married him. In her letters, she described him as a good and attentive husband, but wasn’t sure marriage really suited her. “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife." Perilous indeed, for she died the following year, aged 38. Officially, the cause of death was tuberculosis, but likely she was also suffering from typhoid and complications connected with a pregnancy.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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