THE OTHER BRONTË GIRL
Samantha Ellis uncovers the life of the oft-overlooked sister, Anne
It was 3am, and I was on the website of an American crossstitch emporium, about to buy a kit that would enable me to reproduce Anne Brontë’s sampler. I paused, feeling I’d crossed a line. Was I really going to painstakingly stitch ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his’ onto 28-count linen?
I’m not a biographer or a historian. When I started writing my book about Anne, I imagined I’d use secondary sources; especially since I knew the Brontës’ famously messy handwriting had led more than one biographer astray. I didn’t want to be like Virginia Moore, who misread the title of one of Emily Brontë’s poems, ‘Love’s Farewell’, as ‘Louis Parensell’, and became convinced he was Emily’s secret lover (a theory she explored at length in her 1936 book on the subject). So much for Anne’s words. As for her possessions, with a few clicks, I could call up images of anything. Without leaving my sofa, I found her bible in the Morgan Library in New York, admired its red Morocco binding and read her pencilled question on the flyleaf: ‘What, Where, and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’
But as I got deeper into the book, I wanted more. I wanted to get close to Anne. I wanted to stand where she stood, see what she saw, read her scrawls, parse her ink-blots even. It was a thrill when I saw her. All right, dreamt her, but it didn’t feel like a dream. She sat on my bed, and berated me for taking so long to write her book. And, yes, she called it hers.
If I’d been less startled, I could have settled a longstanding argument about the colour of Anne’s hair. When I started looking at various locks at the Brontë Parsonage archive, I saw why the controversy still raged; the colours varied wildly. A few plaits, which Charlotte had preserved in a brooch, were even stained green by copper curlicues. And maybe they weren’t Anne’s; unscrupulous Victorian jewellers were forever mixing up hair, or replacing tricky tresses with others that were easier to handle, even substituting horse hair on occasion.
Yet I kept chasing some kind of encounter or connection. At the little house where Anne was born (now a café) I had a cappuccino. I deciphered elegant, slanted, spindly writing. I discovered that many of the available texts of her novels were corrupted, so the nice, neat editions were no use to me. If only I could lean over her shoulder and read what she really wrote at her portable writing desk (decadently lined in pink velvet). If only, when I stared at the portrait Charlotte made of her at 14, pallid and constrained in a skinny black choker, Anne would stare back. I nearly got lost on the Yorkshire hills, following in her footsteps, because she took such pleasure in ‘the pathless moor’. I went to her school (still a school), to the house where she was a governess (now a school), to the inn where she stayed in London (bombed in the Blitz). I cried over her last letter, and at the bloodstains on her handkerchief. At the lodgings where she died in Scarborough (now a hotel) I gazed at the sea, as she did. And I felt guilty. Because Anne was very private, and maybe she wouldn’t have wanted me stalking her.
Finally I found what I was looking for in Anne’s sketchbook. It was only by chance that I saw it – its owners had lent it to the Brontë Parsonage archive. Slipping on latex gloves, I ran my hands over the cover, and pulled out Anne’s work. One landscape was splattered with what looked like rain. But what really got me was a drawing of a speckled hen sitting in a basket lined with straw. It felt so intimate. So alive.
Maybe to write about a person properly you have to let them haunt you. Certainly you have to let yourself be changed. Anne didn’t get me cross-stitching, but she did make me want to be bolder, to expand my heart. It is no coincidence that while writing the book, I fell in love. Anne never had a love affair, so how did she write about it so powerfully? I can’t say. Some secrets she still hugs to herself. ‘Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life’ by Samantha Ellis (£16.99, Chatto & Windus) is out now.