Early women writers had to fight for their place in the literary world and that’s how it was for Anne Brontë who published under a male pseudonym.
No one can dispute that Anne Brontë (1820-1849) was a writer ahead of her time, even though she wasn’t as well-known as her sisters – Charlotte and Emily. She was born the last of seven children of Patrick and Maria Brontë. Her mother, Maria, died of tuberculosis when Anne was only one year old. Their first two children also died at age eleven with the same disease. Patrick encouraged his children’s imaginations and urged them to stretch their minds so it was no surprise that they all became poets, writers, and Branwell, his only son, a painter. Creativity ran high in all the children due to the early exposure to a multitude of literature pieces.
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all attended Miss Wooler’s school in Roe Head, England then worked as governesses once they graduated. But all of them wrote poetry as a regular escape from work.
After much struggle of finding a publisher, Anne released her first book, Agnes Grey in 1847, the same year Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights made an appearance. But they were all published under male pseudonyms until 1850 after the deaths of Anne and Emily. Finally, Charlotte revealed their true identities.
Anne’s second book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published a year before her death and the subject matter of it as well as her first book made people uncomfortable. She shined a light on martial abuse, alcoholism, opium addiction, infidelity, class inequality, and the right of a woman to choose her own life. No one spoke of these things, they simply endured them. Her sisters Charlotte and Emily glossed over these subjects and tended to romanticize such issues of the day.
Anne died at twenty-nine years of age with two published books to her name and a body of poetry. Charlotte lived to age thirty-nine, the longest of all seven children. They all died of tuberculosis and it’s sad that their father outlived them all.
Of the sisters, Anne wanted to write the truth no matter how painful or that no one wanted to hear it. She felt she owed it to herself to expose the problems of the times and be truthful. That simply wasn’t done in her day. Literary scholars proclaimed her far ahead of her time and celebrate her books.
Here is what she wrote just days before her death: I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect … But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.
If you had lived back then, do you think you’d have read her books? I think I would’ve been curious. I loved Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by her sisters.
