In Search Of Anne Brontë Nick Holland

The History Press €29.50

Thanks to this moving biography, we now know why the poor old Brontës kept dropping dead with alacrity – Branwell at 31, Emily at 30, Anne at 29, and Charlotte at 38. Howarth, their residence in Yorkshire, was ‘one of the unhealthiest places to live in all England’.

There were sanitation problems, the parish pumps were pestiferous and there were continual epidemics of measles, cholera and typhoid.

Anne, described here as ‘quiet and thoughtful’, grew up in a tense atmosphere of mourning and illness. Within a year of her birth, her mother died of chronic pelvic sepsis and anaemia. Then, in 1825, the two eldest siblings, Elizabeth and Maria, died of consumption.

At least their father the Reverend Patrick Brontë supported their education but the school in Cowan Bridge was brutal. Charlotte depicted it in Jane Eyre.

Anne left home in 1839 to become a governess at Blake Hall. It was a pathetic existence that inspired her novel Agnes Grey. Branwell visited her at her next posting at Thorp Green, and had an affair with the mistress of the house. The scandal partially formed the background to her other book, The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, in its day ‘the fastest-selling Brontë novel of them all’, says Holland. Anne’s own chance at love, with curate William Weightman, was scuppered by his death in 1842, aged 28, of cholera.

It was a legacy from an aunt that allowed the sisters publish their work under male pseudonyms. By 1847, the money had begun to roll in, but within two years Anne was dead of tuberculosis.

Holland’s triumph is that Anne is given a voice and is no longer swamped by her sisters. His account of the alarming world of religious fervour, disease, emotional claustrophobia (sexual frustration) in which they lived makes an excellent read.