Brontë family

• 1. Introduction

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  In July 1848, two nervous young women from the Brontë family took a train to London. They arrived at the offices of the publisher Smith, Elder & Co. They had no proof of who they were except letters addressed to Messrs. Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell. The women were Charlotte and Anne. Their sister Emily had refused to come. The publisher, George Smith, was astonished by what he found.

  Behind that awkward meeting lies a set of puzzles. Why did three clergyman's daughters from Yorkshire hide behind masculine names? How did one household produce Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall? What made a remote parsonage a place that people still travel to see?

  The answers begin with a man who changed his own name, and with a house where storytelling started as a children's game.

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• 2. Thunder and the Parsonage

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  Patrick Brontë was born on the 17th of March 1777 in Loughbrickland, County Down, under the name Prunty or Brunty. His family were farm workers of moderate means. His mother, Alice McClory, was Roman Catholic, but his father, Hugh, was Protestant, and Patrick was raised in his father's faith. A bright boy, he studied under the Rev. Thomas Tighe and won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge. There he read divinity, ancient history and modern history. He was ordained on the 10th of August 1806. He also wrote verse, publishing Cottage Poems in 1811 and The Rural Minstrel in 1814.

  Behind the surname Brunty lay the Irish clan Ó Pronntaigh, a family of hereditary scribes and literary men in Fermanagh. The Irish form means "descendant of Pronntach." It was anglicised as Prunty and sometimes Brunty. Patrick eventually settled on Brontë, with two dots over the last letter to show that the name has two syllables. Why he did so is unsettled. He may have wanted to hide his humble origins. As a man who knew classical Greek, he may have borrowed the word for thunder, βροντή.

  In 1896 the biographer Clement Shorter proposed a link to Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was also Duke of Bronte. Patrick admired Nelson. Another possibility involves his brother William, who may have fallen foul of the authorities through the radical United Irishmen. That would have given Patrick a reason to distance himself from the old name. Patrick's son Branwell also wrote a long poem about Nelson, titled Bronté.

  In 1811 Patrick was appointed minister at Hartshead-cum-Clifton, and in 1812 he married Maria Branwell at Guiseley. Maria was 29. She came from Penzance in Cornwall, from a comfortably off middle-class family whose father ran a flourishing tea and grocery store. By 1820 the couple had moved into the parsonage at Haworth, where Patrick took up the post of perpetual curate. He could not be rector or vicar, because Haworth was an ancient chapelry within the large parish of Bradford. They had six children.

  Maria died on the 15th of September 1821, aged 38, of uterine cancer. She had been literate, pious, lively and tender. She designed the samplers now displayed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and her children embroidered them. Charlotte and Patrick remembered a vivacious woman. Emily and Anne kept only vague images of her suffering on her sickbed.

  Elizabeth Branwell, Maria's sister, arrived from Penzance in 1821 at the age of 45 and became Aunt Branwell to the children. She was a Methodist, though her denomination seems to have left no mark on them. She taught them arithmetic and the alphabet, along with sewing, embroidery and cross-stitch. She also gave them books and subscribed to Fraser's Magazine, which supplied plenty to discuss. She probably told them of eighteenth-century pirate raids in Cornwall, where British residents were carried off to be enslaved in North Africa and Turkey. Charlotte mentions enslavement in Turkey in Jane Eyre. Aunt Branwell never married, and she never returned to Cornwall to visit her relations.

  After several failed attempts to remarry, Patrick accepted permanent widowerhood at the age of 47. He spent his days visiting the sick and the poor, giving sermons and administering communion. That left Maria, Elizabeth, Emily, Charlotte, Branwell and Anne in the care of Aunt Branwell and a maid named Tabitha Aykroyd, called Tabby. Tabby told local legends in her Yorkshire dialect as she prepared the family's meals. Patrick bought every book and toy the children wanted, and he gave them great freedom and unconditional love. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, suggested that his eccentric habits and peculiar theories of education may also have cut them off from the world. He would outlive every one of his children, dying in 1861 at the age of 84, six years after Charlotte.

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• 3. Cowan Bridge and Roe Head

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  In 1824, four of the Brontë girls, all but Anne, entered the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. It took the children of less prosperous clergy, and it had been recommended to Patrick. His means were modest and his connections few, so he could not afford an established school for young ladies. The Reverend Carus Wilson's school charged little, and its patrons were all respected people. One was the daughter of Hannah More, a religious author and philanthropist with a keen interest in education. Reports in the Leeds Intelligencer in 1823 and 1824 told of other charity schools. There, pupils had been gnawed by rats or so malnourished that some lost their sight. Nothing suggested to Patrick that Wilson's school belonged in that company.

  In 1825, Maria and Elizabeth fell gravely ill and were removed from the school. Maria, aged 11, died at Haworth on the 6th of May 1825, having come home with advanced tuberculosis. Charlotte remembered her as lively, sensitive and unusually advanced in her reading. Elizabeth, aged 10, died on the 15th of June 1825, within two weeks of returning to her father. Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn as well. The disease that took the eldest girls would later return to the parsonage and kill three more Brontës.

  In Jane Eyre, Cowan Bridge became Lowood School. Maria was the model for the young Helen Burns. A teacher named Miss Andrews is thought to have inspired the harsh Miss Scatcherd, and the tyrannical headmaster Rev. Carus Wilson became Mr Brocklehurst. Charlotte drew on memories of scanty and often spoiled food, no heating and too little clothing. She recalled severe, arbitrary punishments and epidemics of what was probably typhus. She blamed the school's poor medical care for her sisters' deaths, especially repeated emetics and bloodletting. She also blamed a doctor who was the director's brother-in-law.

  Several decades before the Brontës' ordeal, Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra caught typhus at a similar boarding school, and Jane nearly died. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and first biographer, confirmed that Cowan Bridge was the model for Lowood and insisted that conditions there were egregious. More recent biographers argue that its food, clothing, heating, medical care and discipline were not considered substandard for religious schools of the day. One scholar has praised Patrick for removing all his daughters a few weeks before Maria and Elizabeth died.

  In 1829-30, Patrick hired John Bradley, an artist from nearby Keighley, as drawing-master. Bradley had local repute rather than professional training as an instructor. He may nonetheless have fostered Branwell's enthusiasm for art and architecture.

  Charlotte was fourteen in 1831 when she was enrolled at Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, Mirfield. A cheaper school in Keighley lay nearer home. However, the Wooler sisters had a good reputation, and Patrick remembered the building from his walks through the nearby parishes. Charlotte was happy and studied well. She made lifelong friends, notably Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, who later went to New Zealand before returning to England. She came home in June 1832.

  Three years later Miss Wooler offered her former pupil a post as assistant. Emily, aged 17, went along to pursue studies that the family could not otherwise afford, with her fees partly covered by Charlotte's salary. On the 29th of July 1835 the sisters left for Roe Head. The same day, Branwell wrote to the Royal Academy of Art in London, presenting several drawings in his bid to become a probationary student. Emily did not settle. After three months her health seemed to fail and she was taken home. Anne took her place and stayed until Christmas 1837. Margaret Wooler's fondness for the sisters lasted, and years later she would accompany Charlotte to the altar at her wedding.

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• 4. Glass Town and Gondal

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  In early June 1826, Patrick Brontë gave Branwell twelve wooden soldiers, and the household's imaginations caught fire. The children called the toys the Young Men and gave each one a name. Their ideas first took written form in December 1827, when the imaginary African kingdom of Glass Town appeared on paper. The Empire of Angria followed. After Charlotte left for school in 1831, Emily and Anne created Gondal, an island continent in the North Pacific ruled by a woman.

  The first stories were written in books about 1.5 by 2.5 inches, roughly the size of a matchbox, loosely bound with thread. The pages were filled with tiny, close writing, often in capital letters and without punctuation. Each child added illustrations, detailed maps, landscapes and plans of buildings according to their specialty. The books were sized so that the soldiers could read them. As the children grew, the stories grew more complex. They were fed by the three weekly or monthly magazines that Patrick subscribed to. Newspapers bought daily from John Greenwood's local news and stationery store added more.

  A June 1826 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine shows how closely they read. An article on newly explored central Africa carried a map. It showed the Jibbel Kumera, the Mountains of the Moon, along with Ashantee and the rivers Niger and Calabar. All of these appear in the children's tales. The article urged the British to expand into Africa from Fernando Po, and Christine Alexander notes that the children placed their Great Glass Town there. The Brontës also owned Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography and annotated it heavily. Patrick preferred Blackwood's to the Quarterly Review, which defended similar politics but addressed a less refined readership.

  Blackwood's introduced them to Lord Byron in an article from August 1825, the year after the poet died. From that moment, the name Byron stood for everything forbidden and daring. From 1833, the Angrian tales of Charlotte and Branwell feature Byronic heroes with strong sexual magnetism, arrogance and even black-heartedness. Zamorna, a hero of Verdopolis, the capital of Glass Town, drifts toward ever more ambiguous behaviour. The same type returns in Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. The Thousand and One Nights added jinn and a touch of exoticism, with the children placing themselves at the centre of their own kingdoms.

  Around 1820, three mezzotint engravings by John Martin hung on the parsonage walls. They were Belshazzar's Feast, Déluge, and Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon, dated 1816. Charlotte and Branwell copied them. Martin's fantastic architecture shows in the Glass Town and Angrian writings. There he appears among Branwell's characters as Edward de Lisle, the greatest painter and portraitist of Verdopolis. One of de Lisle's major works, Les Quatre Genii en Conseil, is inspired by Martin's own illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost.

  Mary Shelley's dystopian novel The Last Man and the poetry of Percy Shelley have been shown to have shaped their juvenile work. Walter Scott held an even firmer grip. In 1834 Charlotte declared, "For fiction, read Walter Scott and only him." His shadow reaches her tale The Green Dwarf, published only in 2003. It was probably inspired by Scott's The Black Dwarf, and it imagines a war between Verdopolis and Senegal.

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• 5. Governesses and Brussels

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  Janet Todd's biography of Mary Wollstonecraft describes the predicament the Brontë sisters faced. With Patrick's modest income, the only options were marriage, school teaching or work as a governess. Becoming a paid companion to a rich, solitary woman was a possible fall-back, but it would probably have bored any of them intolerably.

  Emily never became a governess. Her only teaching was six months at Miss Patchett's school at Law Hill, between Haworth and Halifax, which she found an intolerable exile. Charlotte taught at Miss Margaret Wooler's school and in Brussels with the Hegers. She was also governess to the Sidgwicks, the Stonegappes and the Lotherdales for several months in 1839. Then she worked for Mrs White at Upperhouse House, Rawdon, from March to September 1841. Anne worked for Mrs Ingham at Blake Hall, Mirfield, from April to December 1839. She then joined Mrs Robinson at Thorp Green Hall, Little Ouseburn, near York. Things went well there, and she stayed from May 1840 to June 1845.

  Emily had a visceral need of her home and the countryside around it, and leaving them made her languish and wither. Charlotte, meanwhile, had an idea. On the advice of her father and friends, she proposed a school for young girls in the parsonage, where the Sunday School classes were held. To teach modern languages well, the sisters would first prepare abroad. Paris and Lille were considered and rejected, since the Tory-spirited, conservative girls had not forgotten the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. A pastor based in Brussels offered his help, so Belgium was chosen, with German and music on offer as well. Aunt Branwell provided the funds.

  In February 1842, Charlotte and Emily arrived in Brussels accompanied by their father. They enrolled for six months at the boarding school of Monsieur and Madame Heger in the Rue d'Isabelle. Claire Heger, the second wife of Constantin, founded and directed the school, while Constantin took charge of the higher French classes. A former pupil, Miss Wheelwright, said he had the intellect of a genius. He was a good-looking man with bushy hair and very black whiskers, and he demanded lectures, perspectives and structured analyses from his students. Charlotte greatly valued his lessons. Emily hardly liked her teacher and was somewhat rebellious, yet she learned German and played the piano with natural brilliance. Within months both sisters were writing literary and philosophical essays in advanced French.

  After six months, Madame Heger suggested they stay free of charge in return for giving some lessons. After much hesitation, the sisters accepted. Neither felt attached to her students. Only Mademoiselle de Bassompierre, then aged 16, later expressed affection for Emily. The feeling seemed mutual, and Emily gave her a signed, detailed drawing of a storm-ravaged pine tree.

  Aunt Branwell died in October 1842, after a brief agony in which her nephew Branwell comforted her. Her will left the three nieces £900, about £95,700 in 2017 currency, and a cousin in Penzance, Eliza Kingston, shared in the estate. The money cleared the sisters' debts, left a small reserve, and allowed them to resign from low-paid posts as governesses and teachers. Even so, the Hegers asked them back, since they were competent and needed. Charlotte was offered a teaching post in English and Emily one in music.

  Charlotte returned to Belgium alone in January 1843. Emily stayed critical of Monsieur Heger, despite the excellent opinion he held of her. He later said that she "had the spirit of a man." He thought she would probably become a great traveller, thanks to her superior reason. Her unbending willpower, he said, would triumph over all obstacles.

  Almost a year to the day after her return, Charlotte resigned. She had grown enamoured of Monsieur Heger, and life at the school had not been without suffering. On one occasion she ventured into the cathedral and entered a confessional. She may have considered converting to Catholicism, but only briefly. Back at Haworth, Patrick had lost his sight. His cataract was operated on successfully in Manchester, and it was there in August 1846, at his bedside, that Charlotte began to write Jane Eyre. Meanwhile Branwell fell into a rapid decline of drunkenness and delirium. His poor reputation was partly responsible for the failure of the school project, which was abandoned.

  Charlotte wrote four long, very personal letters to Monsieur Heger, and none received a reply. The full extent of her feelings was not realised until 1913, when the letters were first published. Heger had shown them to Elizabeth Gaskell when she visited him in 1856. She was researching her biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and she concealed their true significance. Heger had torn the letters up, but his wife retrieved the pieces from the wastepaper bin and carefully glued or sewed them back together. Paul Héger, Constantin's son, and his sisters gave them to the British Museum, and they were soon printed in The Times.

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• 6. Poems and Pseudonyms

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  Charlotte wrote to Robert Southey, the poet laureate, enclosing several poems in his own style. His reply, arriving after several months, was hardly encouraging. Southey stood beside William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among the great figures of English Romanticism. He also shared the prejudice of his era that poetry was a man's business. He held that ladies from good families should be satisfied with an education and a marriage embellished by a few decorative talents. Women had been publishing fiction with critical, popular and economic success for over a century by then. Patrick's own The Maid of Kilarney gives a character a similar view, calling softness, tenderness and grace the forte of women. Yet Patrick encouraged his daughters, even if he did not know quite what they did with their time.

  One day in the autumn of 1845, Charlotte was alone in the dining room. She noticed a small notebook lying open in the drawer of Emily's portable writing desk. Reading it, she was dazzled. Five years later she recalled the poems as "condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine," with a peculiar music that was "wild, melancholy, and elevating." Emily was indignant that her sister had ventured into such an intimate realm. It took her hours to calm down and days to be convinced to publish.

  Charlotte envisaged a joint publication by the three sisters. Anne was easily won over, and the poems were shared, compared and edited. Nineteen were chosen for Charlotte and twenty-one each for Anne and Emily. For advice, Charlotte turned to William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, directors of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal. It is thought that they pointed the sisters to Aylott & Jones, a small publishing house at 8, Paternoster Row, London. No documents support the claim. The firm accepted the book, but at the authors' own risk, since it felt the commercial risk was too great.

  The book appeared in 1846 under the names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. These were very uncommon forenames, but each sister's initials were preserved. The shared surname may have been inspired by Arthur Bell Nicholls. He took up his duties as curate at Haworth on the 18th of May 1845, when the project was well advanced. The book attracted hardly any attention. Only three copies were sold. One was bought by Fredrick Enoch of Cornmarket, Warwick, who wrote to the publisher in admiration to request an autograph. His letter led to the only known document carrying all three pseudonymous signatures.

  In the months that followed, each sister worked in secret on a novel. They discussed their writing for hours at the dining table. At 9 p.m. their father would appear and tell the girls not to stay up late. Then he would rewind the clock and go upstairs to his room.

  In 1847, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey all appeared, but only after many tribulations in finding a publisher. The packets holding the manuscripts kept coming back to the parsonage, and Charlotte simply added a new address, at least a dozen times that year. Jane Eyre was finally taken by Smith, Elder & Co in London. Its owner, George Smith, was 23 and had specialised in scientific reviews, and he was aided by a perceptive reader named William Smith Williams. The manuscripts of Emily and Anne went to Thomas Cautley Newby. He planned a three-decker, a format cheaper to sell and to lend through the circulating libraries. Its first two volumes held Wuthering Heights and the third held Agnes Grey.

  Critics were fairly neutral about Agnes Grey and more flattering about Jane Eyre. It soon became a best-seller, despite some commentators denouncing it as an affront to good morals. Wuthering Heights drew praise for its original subject and narrative style, but also suspicion because of its outrageous violence and immorality. Surely, the critics wrote, it was the work of a man with a depraved mind. Newby then launched a rumour that all three novels were by one author, understood to be Ellis Bell. That rumour is what sent Charlotte and Anne to London in July 1848. Smith introduced them to his mother with all the dignity their talent merited. He then invited them to the opera for Gioachino Rossini's Barber of Seville.

  Wuthering Heights was published under the name Ellis Bell. Sales were considerable for an unknown author with a novel that defied every convention. It is a work of black Romanticism. The cold countryside isolates three generations between two opposing houses: the dignified manor of Thrushcross Grange and the rambling, dilapidated Wuthering Heights. Its characters are swept by tumults of the earth, the skies and the heart. The story is told by two narrators, the traveller and tenant Lockwood and the housekeeper and governess Nelly Dean. Their accounts overlap, with digressions and sub-plots that form, from apparently scattered fragments, a coherently locked unit.

  In 1848, Anne published a second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, far more ambitious than her first. It was a great success and quickly outsold Wuthering Heights, though critics were divided, praising its "power" and "effect" and sharply condemning it as "coarse." Its heroine, Helen Graham, marries Arthur Huntingdon for love and soon finds him lecherous, violent and alcoholic. She breaks with the conventions that would keep her in the family home and flees with her child to the old house of Wildfell Hall. When drink brings her husband to ruin, she returns to nurse him until his death. Most critics today consider it one of the first sustained feminist novels.

  After Anne's death, Charlotte wrote to her publisher that the novel "hardly appears to me desirable to preserve." She prevented its republication, which is considered the main reason Anne is less renowned than her sisters. In 1850, Charlotte wrote a preface for a reprint of the combined edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. In it she publicly revealed the real identities of all three authors.

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• 7. Losses on the Hill

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  Haworth's population grew from hardly 1,000 to 3,365 in the first half of the 19th century. The village had no sewage system. The well water was contaminated by faecal matter and by the decomposition of bodies in the cemetery on the hilltop. Life expectancy was less than 25 years, and infant mortality was around 41% for children under six months. The parsonage's toilet was a bare plank over a pit in a back shed, with a lower plank for the children. Deaths were so common that the Brontë family's losses left little impression on the villagers.

  Branwell Brontë, 1817-1848, was considered a genius by his father and sisters. He had often been the driving force behind the imaginary worlds, and his father encouraged his art. He went to London to make a name as a painter, but spent his father's allowance in days in disreputable cafés. His attempts to find low-paid work failed, and he sank into alcohol and laudanum. The village pharmacy supplied him. In January 1843 Anne obtained employment for him at Thorp Green, but nearly three years later he was dismissed.

  Under the pseudonym Northangerland, Branwell published pieces in local newspapers, including "Real Rest" in the Halifax Guardian on the 8th of November 1846. He also left an unfinished novel, probably from around 1845, called And the Weary are at Rest. He died of tuberculosis on the 24th of September 1848, aged 31. His father tearfully repeated, "My brilliant boy." Emily, clear-headed and loyal, wrote that his condition had been "hopeless." Daphne du Maurier's 1986 book The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë dwells on his addiction.

  Emily has been called the "Sphinx of Literature." She wrote without any desire for fame. Outside the family circle she was obsessively timid, sometimes turning her back on a conversation partner without a word. In The Second Sex in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir named her among the few writers who had tried to approach nature "in its inhuman freedom." Emily loved above all to wander the wild moors around Haworth. Her poems were probably written to be inserted into the saga of Gondal. At the age of 28, she was still acting out scenes from the little books with Anne on the train to York. "Remembrance" was one of the 21 poems chosen for the 1846 joint publication.

  In September 1848 Emily's health began to decline rapidly. Consumptive, she refused all treatment except one visit from a London doctor, which her relatives insisted upon even though it was already too late. She died on the 19th of December 1848, aged 30. Popular belief says she died on the dining room sofa, but there is no contemporary evidence for that. Charlotte, in a letter to William Smith Williams, mentions Emily's dog Keeper lying at the side of her deathbed. Several documents hint that Emily left an unfinished manuscript that Charlotte burned, though no proof has been found.

  On the 5th of April 1849, Anne wrote to Ellen Nussey asking her to come to Scarborough, on the east coast. In it she confided, "I long to do some good in the world before I leave it." She added that she did not want her humble, limited schemes to come to nothing. The doctor had recommended sea air, and Charlotte agreed to go. On the Sunday morning Anne felt weaker and asked to be taken back to Haworth. The doctor confirmed that she was near death, and Anne thanked him for his candour. "Take courage, take courage," she murmured to Charlotte. She died at 2 pm on Monday the 28th of May 1849, aged 29.

  Anne is buried in the cemetery of St Mary's at Scarborough. Her gravestone gave her age as 28, an error Charlotte noticed on her only visit, and she meant to ask the mason to correct it. Ill health left her no time to do so. The stone remained as it was until the Brontë Society replaced it in April 2013.

  Charlotte, the last surviving sister, published Shirley in 1849 and Villette in 1853. George Smith pressed her to come to London to meet her public. Despite a timidity that nearly stopped her speaking among strangers, she agreed to be lionised. She met Harriet Martineau and William Makepeace Thackeray, who both befriended her. She especially admired Thackeray, and his portrait, a gift from Smith, still hangs in the dining room at the parsonage. At one gathering Thackeray introduced her to his mother as Jane Eyre. When she called on him the next day, she delivered an extended dressing-down, and Smith had to intervene. In 1851 she visited the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace.

  Arthur Bell Nicholls, 1818-1906, had been curate of Haworth for seven and a half years. Then he proposed to Charlotte, to the fury of her father. She found him rigid and conventional, "like all the curates," as she wrote to Ellen Nussey. After she declined, Nicholls left his duties for several months. Slowly her feelings changed, and after convincing her father she married Nicholls on the 29th of June 1854. They honeymooned in Ireland, where she met his aunt and cousins. She wrote to Nussey, "Indeed-indeed-Nell-it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."

  Charlotte died the following year, on the 31st of March 1855, aged 38. The cause given at the time was tuberculosis. It may have been complicated by typhoid fever, since the water at Haworth was likely contaminated, and by hyperemesis gravidarum from an early pregnancy. Her novel The Professor appeared in 1857. An unfinished fragment, Emma, was published in 1860 with an introduction by Thackeray, and it later inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel A Little Princess.

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• 8. Pilgrims and Stones

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  Elizabeth Gaskell published her biography of Charlotte in 1857 at Patrick's request. She had stayed at Haworth several times and had hosted Charlotte at Plymouth Grove, Manchester, so she knew the family. Her book helped create the myth of a family of condemned genius living in painful, romantic solitude. It opens with two chapters on the wild countryside around Haworth and the social, sanitary and economic conditions of the region.

  Patrick approved the commission at first, but several months later he expressed doubts. He felt Gaskell's portrait of Nicholls, partly founded on the confidences of Ellen Nussey, was unjustified. Nussey hated Arthur and insisted that his marital claims had perverted Charlotte's writing. Arthur, for his part, found Nussey too close to his wife and insisted she destroy her letters, though that never happened. The book caused a sensation and was distributed nationwide. The quarrel launched by Patrick only increased the family's fame.

  By 1860, the only people living at the parsonage were Patrick, his son-in-law Arthur Bell Nicholls, and two servants. During Charlotte's lifetime, friends and sponsors such as Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth, Ellen Nussey and Elizabeth Gaskell had visited. After the biography, admirers began arriving to see the place with their own eyes. Nicholls recalled having to protect his father-in-law on the short path to the church. Crowds pushed to touch the cape of the father of the Brontë girls. The hundreds of visitors became thousands, coming from all over Britain and from across the Atlantic. Patrick received them with utmost courtesy. He recounted the story of his brilliant daughters and never failed to express displeasure at the opinions held about Nicholls.

  The flow has never abated. The parsonage at Haworth received an estimated 88,000 visitors in 2017. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is managed by the Brontë Society. The society organises exhibitions and cares for the objects and documents that belonged to the family. It has branches in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, South Africa and the USA.

  Virginia Woolf visited Haworth in 1904 and published an account in The Guardian on the 21st of December. She remarked that utensils and clothes, which would normally have vanished before their owners, had survived. This helped one better understand the sisters' singular presence. She wrote: "Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell."

  The sisters' birthplace in Thornton has been acquired by a community benefit society to preserve it. As of 2024 there are plans to restore the house as a "social and educational space." In 2018, the academic and writer Michael Stewart of the University of Huddersfield worked with the Bradford Literature Festival on the Brontë Stones project. Four newly commissioned poems were inscribed on stones between the birthplace and the parsonage. The Anne Stone carries a poem by Jackie Kay and stands in a wildflower meadow behind the parsonage. The Charlotte Stone, with a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, is set in the wall of the birthplace in Thornton.

  Emily is remembered in a poem by Kate Bush, known for her 1978 song "Wuthering Heights." It is carved into a rock outcrop of Ogden Kirk, on moorland above Ogden Water. A fourth stone, the Brontë Stone, commemorates all three sisters with a poem by Jeanette Winterson and stands in Thornton Cemetery. Published walks link the stones, including the 15 mile Emily Brontë Walk, recognised by the Long Distance Walkers Association. The project was found to have increased local engagement with the landscape, regenerated ancient public rights of way and stimulated cultural tourism.

  The sisters had neither predecessors nor successors, and there is no Brontë line of writers in the way there is among realists or romantic poets. Later writers doubtless thought of them while creating dark and tormented worlds. Examples include Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and George Eliot's Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. In a letter from 1853, Matthew Arnold said of Charlotte that she only pretends to heartlessness, with "nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage." Mrs Humphry Ward, author of Robert Elsmere, found only the didactic in Charlotte, while she admired in Emily a happy blend of romance and realism.

  Patrick's line died out with his children, but his brother had notable descendants. They include James Brontë Gatenby, who studied Golgi bodies in animals and humans, and Peter Gatenby, formerly medical director of the United Nations. In Catherynne M. Valente's young-adult novel The Glass Town Game, published in 2017, the Brontës find themselves pulled through into their own creation.

  A plaque to the three sisters was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey on the 8th of October 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War meant there was no ceremony. A formal unveiling followed in 1947. Only in 2024 did anyone notice that the dots over the final e in their name were missing, and the error was corrected.

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