Brontë

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

The Brontë 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.

Family origins and name

The sisters were the daughters of Reverend Patrick Brontë, born in County Down, Ireland in 1777 and the son of William Bronte. His Gaelic name was, Padraig mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh, which translates literally as Patrick, son of the man whose first name is fire, grandson of the women whose first name is bestower.

The surname mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh was earlier anglicised as Prunty or sometimes Brunty. There are many stories of how their name was changed from Brunty to Bronte. At some point, Patrick Brunty/Bronte conceived of the alternate spelling with the dieresis over the terminal "e"; the dieresis in Brontë is meant to indicate that the name is of two syllables.

The surname Bronte without the dieresis is found in Sicily. The town Bronte, Catania, is derived from the name of a Greek mythological giant Cyclopes.

Three sisters emerge

The three sisters grew up in Haworth, near Keighley in West 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 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. The sisters 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 their 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 some of her juvenile writings remained unpublished until the late twentieth century. 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. It helped create the myth of a doomed family living in romantic solitude.

See also

• Brontë Country

References

Further reading

• Alexander, Christine and Sellars, J. (1995) The art of the Brontës, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43248-0
• Barker, Juliet R.V. (1995) The Brontës, London : Phoenix Press, ISBN 1-84212-587-7

External links

• Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth
• The Brontës

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at 14:41:09 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation