Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte wrote the hardest of the Bronte novels and her own sister kept it out of print. She was the youngest of the six, raised largely by her aunt, and the only one who held a post outside the family for any length of time - nearly five years as a governess with the Robinson family at Thorp Green, which gave her the material for Agnes Grey and gave Branwell the affair that destroyed him. Agnes Grey, published alongside Wuthering Heights in 1847, is a flat, exact account of what governessing actually involved, and reads as documentary beside her sisters. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848 is about a woman who leaves her alcoholic husband, takes their child, and supports herself by painting under a false name - legally impossible at the time and morally scandalous to reviewers, who called it coarse. It sold well. Charlotte refused to allow it to be reprinted after Anne's death, saying the subject had been a mistake, and it stayed hard to obtain for decades. She died of tuberculosis at Scarborough, where she had asked to be taken, aged twenty-nine. She published under the name Acton Bell and travelled to London with Charlotte in 1848 to prove to their publisher that the Bells were three separate people rather than one. The second edition of The Tenant carried a preface in which she defended the book s harshness and declined to say whether the author was a man or a woman. Her grave at Scarborough is the only one of the family away from Haworth and its inscription got her age wrong for a century. Her reputation was rebuilt from the 1950s and she is now read as the most direct social critic of the three.

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