17 January: Boreham on Anne Bronte

The Youngest of the Brontes
This is the birthday of Anne Bronte, the youngest of the three famous sisters. It is the third Bronte centenary within a year,[1] and, in anticipation of the triple commemoration, a plaque was placed in Westminster Abbey to perpetuate the girls' renown. Succumbing to her consumption, Anne was not committed to the hungry grave in the grim old church at Haworth in which all the other members of her illustrious family slumber. Of the famous feminine trio, Anne is by far the least knowable. We seem at home with Charlotte, the demure but doughty little governess; we are familiar with Emily, the madcap, the tomboy, the daredevil of that Yorkshire vicarage; but Anne is, to most of us, a pale ghost, a diaphanous wraith, a shadowy transparency, lacking clearcut and convincing outline. She always seems to be hiding shyly behind the ample skirts of her sisters. Her character, as Charlotte tells us, was milder and more subdued than Emily's, yet possessing quiet virtues peculiarly its own. In some respects, she is the most winsome and most lovable of the three.

Anne was the Bronte baby, and, after the fashion of last-born children, she remained the baby to the end of the chapter. She was only a month old when the family went into residence at the unalluring parsonage at the top of the ugly Yorkshire hill, and, before she reached her second birthday, her mother died. Charlotte, although only four years her senior, mothered her all through her brief life, closing her eyes at the last. Even at Roehead, the dreamy old boarding school to which the girls were sent, Charlotte contrived, by staying on as a teacher to remain the guardian angel of her little sister. It was whilst Anne was still at Roehead that she betrayed the first ominous signs of physical frailty. Haunted by knowledge of the family history, Charlotte was terrified. Miss Wooler, the head mistress, strove in vain to pacify her; but Charlotte, charging her chief with callous indifference, packed Anne's belongings and her own, and precipitately left the school.

Three Girls Embark On Desperate Experiment
Thrown together in the old home, the three girls took to scribbling, but none mentioned the matter to the others. Like silkworms in their separate cocoons, each wove her delicate web. It was not until 1845—Anne's 25th year—that Charlotte accidentally discovered a bundle of verses in Emily's handwriting and praised them. Coyly excusing herself, Anne slipped out of the room, returning a few minutes later with a packet of manuscripts that had been secreted in her own drawer. "Since Emily's work has pleased you," she said to Charlotte, "I thought that you might care to glance at mine." And so it all began. They turned to fiction. Painfully aware of the general disapprobation with which the woman novelist was then regarded, they agreed to assume masculine names. Charlotte as Currer Bell wrote "The Professor" and "Jane Eyre;" Emily, as Ellis Bell, wrote "Wuthering Heights;" whilst Anne, as Acton Bell, wrote "Agnes Grey."

Anne's modest effort, though pleasing, lacked the vigour and poignancy of the sturdier masterpieces of her sisters; yet it made its appeal and led the publishers to welcome a second manuscript. And, as in Charlotte's case, her second attempt entirely eclipsed her first. The brilliant successes of Charlotte and Anne with their second ventures set us wondering as to what Emily might have achieved had she lived to supplement "Wuthering Heights" by a further production. When Anne gave "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" to the world, the critics affirmed that, quite obviously, Currer Bell and Acton Bell were merely two names for one person. As a result, Charlotte and Anne, trembling in every limb, had to journey up to London to convince publishers and reviewers that they were not one and the same man! Their arrival created a sensation. The discomfiture of the literary pontiffs can be imagined. The triumph of the moorland girls was complete. London, ashamed of its own obtuseness, feasted and feted them from morning to night.

A Gentle Singer Faces A Glorious Sunset
Unhappily, however, Anne's fragile lungs had been rapidly falling to pieces. Going to her desk for a last time, she penned a few valedictory verses and laid aside her pen for ever:—

I hoped that with the brave and strong my portioned task might lie;
To toll amid the busy throng with purpose pure and high;
But God has fixed another part, and He has fixed it well;
I said so with my bleeding heart when first the anguish fell.

She died at 29, surviving Emily and their brother by only a month or two. As Charlotte, fresh from those two funerals, marked the intensification of Anne's symptoms, she fought for her young sister's life as a wild thing fights to protect its cub. She hurried the patient away to Scarborough, resting for an hour or two at York Minster on the way.

Strictly speaking, the break of journey ought not to have been made. But, with death staring from her pleading eyes, Anne begged to be taken just once more to the glorious old cathedral that she might luxuriate in its stately beauties for the last time. As she sat there, drinking in every detail of the noble architecture, the impression was overpowering, and she had to be carried in a state of collapse from the too affecting scene. On the Sunday evening following their arrival at Scarborough, they sat watching the sunset glow fade from the tranquil waters. The distant ships, as Anne remarked, glittered like burnished brass. Next morning—exactly a century ago today[2]—the end overtook her. Holding Charlotte's hand to the last, and begging her thrice-bereaved sister to be brave, she passed quietly away, bequeathing to posterity—as Shelley, Keats, Byron, Chatterton, and her own sister had done—the wistful contemplation of what might have.

F W Boreham

Image: Anne Bronte

[1] The year Boreham refers to is 1949 as this article appears in the Hobart Mercury on May, 28, 1949.

[2] Boreham implies May 28, 1949 (the day of Anne's death) although this editorial has been selected by Boreham to commemorate Anne's birthday, on January 17.