Brontë

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The Brontë sisters, painted by their brother, Branwell c. 1834. From left to right, Anne, Emily, (there still remains a shadow of Branwell, but he later painted himslef out) and Charlotte

The Brontë /bɹɑnti/ sisters—Charlotte (born April 21, 1816), Emily (born July 30, 1818), and Anne (born January 17, 1820)—were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature.

They were the daughters of Reverend Patrick Brontë (otherwise Brunty or Prunty), who was born in County Down, Ireland. They grew up in Haworth, Yorkshire, surviving their mother and two elder sisters into adulthood. In 1824 the four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled as pupils at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge. The following year Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest daughters, became ill, left the school and died; Charlotte and Emily, understandably, were brought home.

They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies, and they returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after a long search to secure publishers. The novels attracted great critical attention and steadily became bestsellers, but the sisters' careers were shortened by ill-health. Emily died the following year before she could complete another novel, and Anne published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in 1848, a year before her death. Upon publication Jane Eyre received the most critical and commercial success of all the Brontë works, continuing to this day. Charlotte's Shirley appeared in 1849 and was followed by Villette in 1853. Her first novel, The Professor, was published posthumously in 1857; her uncompleted fragment, Emma, was published in 1860; and the novelette The Green Dwarf was unpublished until 2003. Charlotte died at 38 in 1855 after a short illness. She had married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, less than a year earlier.

The first biography of Charlotte was written by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell and published in 1857, which helped create the mythic status of a doomed family in romantic solitude.