Brontë family

The Brontës () were a 19th-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Born to Patrick Brontë, a curate, and his wife, Maria, the sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849), were all poets and novelists who published their work under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively. Their stories attracted attention for their passion and originality immediately following their publication. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes Grey and other works were accepted as masterpieces of literature after their deaths.

The two eldest Brontë children were Maria (1814–1825) and Elizabeth (1815–1825), who both died at an early age. The three surviving sisters and their brother, Branwell (1817–1848) were very close. As children, they developed their imaginations first through oral storytelling and play, set in an intricate imaginary world, and then through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories set in their fictional world. The influence of Mary Shelley’s dystopian novel The Last Man and poet Percy Shelley have been shown to have had an impact on their juvenile work. The early deaths of their mother and two older sisters marked them and profoundly influenced their writing. They were raised in a religious family. The Brontë birthplace in Thornton is a place of pilgrimage and their later home, the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, annually receives hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Origin of the name

The Brontë family can be traced to the Irish clan Ó Pronntaigh, which literally means "descendant of Pronntach". They were a family of hereditary scribes and literary men in Fermanagh. The version Ó Proinntigh, which was first given by Patrick Woulfe in his Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall (transl. Surnames of the Gael and the Foreigner) and reproduced without question by Edward MacLysaght, cannot be accepted as correct, as there were a number of well-known scribes with this name writing in Irish in the 17th and 18th centuries and all of them used the spelling Ó Pronntaigh. The name is derived from the word pronntach or bronntach, which is related to the word bronnadh, meaning "giving" or "bestowal" (pronn is given as an Ulster version of bronn in O'Reilly's Irish English Dictionary.) Patrick Woulfe suggested that it was derived from proinnteach (the refectory of a monastery). Ó Pronntaigh was earlier anglicised as Prunty and sometimes Brunty.

At some point, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), the sisters' father, decided on the alternative spelling with the diaeresis over the terminal ⟨e⟩ to indicate that the name has two syllables. Which mark, if any, adorned the e was rather fluid initially. Multiple theories exist to account for the change, including that he may have wished to hide his humble origins. As a man of letters, he would have been familiar with classical Greek and may have chosen the name after the Greek βροντή (transl. thunder). One view, which the biographer Clement Shorter proposed in 1896, is that he adapted his name to associate himself with Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was also Duke of Bronte. The title was typically spelled without a diacritical mark — as in most English sources and the Italian language — but sometimes it was, as in some Nelson biographies (probably also just seeking to make the name more orthographically pronounceable to English readers; for this purpose Bronté was also used, by the biographers and Branwell Brontë's long poem about Nelson, "Bronté") and Arbëresh, one of the languages spoken in Bronte, Italy at that time. One might also find evidence for this theory in Patrick Brontë's desire to associate himself with the Duke of Wellington in his form of dress.

Family tree

Members of the Brontë family

Patrick Brontë

Patrick Brontë (17 March 1777 – 7 June 1861), the Brontë sisters' father, was born in Loughbrickland, County Down, Ireland, of a family of farm workers of moderate means. His birth name was Patrick Prunty or Brunty. His mother, Alice McClory, was of the Roman Catholic faith, whilst his father, Hugh, was a Protestant, and Patrick was brought up in his father's faith.

He was a bright young man and, after studying under the Rev. Thomas Tighe, won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge. There, he studied divinity, ancient history and modern history. Attending Cambridge may have made him feel that his name was too Irish and he changed its spelling to Brontë (and its pronunciation accordingly), perhaps in honour of Horatio Nelson, whom Patrick admired. It is also possible that his brother William had fallen foul of the authorities for his involvement with the radical United Irishmen, leading Patrick to distance himself from the name Brunty. Having obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, he was ordained on 10 August 1806. He is the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets, several newspaper articles and various rural poems.

In 1811 Patrick was appointed minister at Hartshead-cum-Clifton. In 1812, he met and married 29 year old Maria Branwell at Guiseley. In 1813, they moved to Clough House Hightown, Liversedge, West Riding of Yorkshire and by 1820 they had moved into the parsonage at Haworth, where he took up the post of perpetual curate. (Haworth was an ancient chapelry in the large parish of Bradford, so he could not be rector or vicar.) They had six children. On the death of his wife in 1821, his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Penzance, Cornwall, to help him bring up the children. Open, intelligent, generous and dedicated to educating his children personally, he bought all the books and toys the children desired. He also accorded them great freedom and unconditional love, although Elizabeth Gaskell suggests in her biography of Charlotte Brontë that he may also have alienated them from the world due to his eccentric personal habits and peculiar theories of education.

After several failed attempts to remarry, Patrick accepted permanent widowerhood at the age of 47, and spent his time visiting the sick and the poor, giving sermons and administering communion. In so doing, he would often leave his children Maria, Elizabeth, Emily, Charlotte, Branwell and Anne alone with Elizabeth—Aunt Branwell and a maid, Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby). Tabby helped relieve their possible boredom and loneliness especially by recounting local legends in her Yorkshire dialect as she tirelessly prepared the family's meals. Eventually, Patrick would survive his entire family. Six years after Charlotte's death, he died in 1861 at the age of 84. His son-in-law, the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, would aid Mr Brontë at the end of his life as well.

Maria, née Branwell

Patrick's wife Maria Brontë, née Branwell (15 April 1783 – 15 September 1821), was born in Penzance, Cornwall, and came from a comfortably well-off, middle-class family. Her father had a flourishing tea and grocery store and had accumulated considerable wealth. Maria died at the age of 38 of uterine cancer. She married the same day as her younger sister Charlotte in the church at Guiseley after her fiancé had celebrated the union of two other couples. She was a literate and pious woman, known for her lively spirit, joyfulness and tenderness, and it was she who designed the samplers that are on display in the Brontë Parsonage museum and had them embroidered by her children. She left memories with her husband and with Charlotte, the oldest surviving sibling, of a very vivacious woman. The younger ones, particularly Emily and Anne, admitted to retaining only vague images of their mother, especially of her suffering on her sickbed.