The Brontë Sisters' Brilliant Careers—and Tragically Short Lives

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849), wrote bold novels that scandalized Victorian readers before becoming celebrated parts of the English literary canon. Their creative childhood among the Yorkshire moors inspired the novels that made them famous: Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne). Their close bond and early deaths—none of the sisters lived to see 40—further burnished their literary legend.

Early Losses

Clergyman Patrick Brontë rose from humble origins in Ireland to attend St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1812, he married Maria Branwell of Cornwall. They had six children in six years: Maria (1814), Elizabeth (1815), Charlotte (1816), Patrick “Branwell” (1817), Emily (1818) and Anne (1820). In 1821, when their youngest was a year old, Maria died of cancer.

Patrick’s position as curate of Haworth meant the Brontë family was respectable but not wealthy. “The children were always expected to earn a living,” says Juliet Barker, author of The Brontës. In 1824, Patrick sent his three eldest daughters to the newly opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge to prepare them for a career in teaching.

The school’s horrid conditions were immortalized by Charlotte in Jane Eyre. “The sanitary facilities were terrible and the meals were insufficient. A wave of illness swept over the school, and the Brontë children were just cut down,” says Sue Lonoff de Cuevas, editor and translator of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s The Belgian Essays.

In 1825, first Maria and then Elizabeth caught tuberculosis. Their illness was concealed until they were “literally sent home to die,” says Barker. Maria was 11 and Elizabeth 10. After losing a mother and watching two beloved sisters waste away, 9-year-old Charlotte was thrust into the role of eldest sibling.

“Their profound loss was reflected in their work,” says Barker. “Motherless characters are everywhere. All Charlotte’s heroines were orphans.”

Following the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, Patrick oversaw the education of his children at home. Free from the rigid structure of boarding school, the siblings created collective, make-believe worlds they depicted in poems and prose.

In the 1820s, Charlotte and Branwell created Glass Town, a fantasy world inspired by a box of toy soldiers that Patrick bought for Branwell as a birthday present. Each child named a soldier for their hero. (Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington, while Branwell’s hero was Napoleon.) “They would go out and play in the moors, then write down their adventures,” says Barker.

Charlotte and Branwell evolved the Glass Town saga into stories about an imaginary kingdom called Angria dominated by daring men, conquest and war. “There was a feminist rebellion from the two younger girls. They didn’t want to write about kings and soldiers; they wanted to write about women,” says Barker. Emily and Anne broke off from their older siblings to create the queendom of Gondal.

The children recorded their stories in miniature books that demonstrated their knowledge of literature, the classics, politics … and their developing literary powers. “The later novels wouldn’t exist without that early interplay. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, started off as a story about Angria. Emily’s characters in Gondal are ruled by a queen who has an affair with Douglas, a violent outlaw with a mysterious background who presages Heathcliff,” says Barker, referring to the dark, brooding hero in Emily’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. “They shared a tremendous drive to create, and they influenced one another.”

All of the siblings went on to teach in some capacity, though nothing compared to the shared world they’d built together as children. It was Charlotte who discovered Emily’s poetry and convinced her sisters to pursue publication. “Charlotte was ferociously ambitious,” says de Cuevas. “Publication offered the chance to earn their living not from teaching but from writing—their great love,” says Barker.

The sisters’ first publication was a shared book of poetry released in 1846: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte later explained they’d chosen male pseudonyms—Charlotte was Currer, Emily was Ellis and Anne was Acton—“because we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” Sexism in publishing was far from vague. In 1836, English poet laureate Robert Southey told Charlotte, “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”

When their book of poems sold only two copies, the sisters switched to prose. In 1847, all three published novels: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, based loosely on her experience as a governess for the wealthy. Charlotte had initially submitted a different work, The Professor, but it was rejected by every publisher while her sisters’ books were jointly accepted. Inspired by an encouraging letter inviting her to submit other work, Charlotte completed Jane Eyre in under a year. “It poured out of her. She drew from her own life instead of the Angria themes, transforming Cowan Bridge [School] into Lowood Institution,” says Barker, speaking of the real-life school and its fictional counterpart.

“Jane Eyre was an instant success and a titillating scandal. She eviscerated society ladies, their ambitions for marriage and their contempt for the poor governess who sits quietly in the corner,” says Barker. Charlotte’s coup encouraged Emily and Anne’s publisher to finally print their work after multiple delays.

The books’ depictions of violence, lust and female independence shocked Victorian audiences. Wuthering Heights was attacked as “a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.” Emily would not live to see the tide of public opinion turn in her favor.

Branwell, who struggled with opium and alcohol abuse, died in 1848 at 31 of tuberculosis. Emily caught a cold at his funeral and died four months later at 30 of tuberculosis complications. She had never stopped working on her childhood Gondal poems.

Anne died the following year at 29 of tuberculosis while on a trip to Scarborough, a coastal town in North Yorkshire, England, to take the “sea cure.” Charlotte tried to suppress the posthumous publication of Anne’s final book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, fearing it would be attacked in the press like its predecessors. “Charlotte lost her three remaining siblings in nine months. To have reviews still coming out and impugning the moral character of her sisters was horrible beyond belief,” explains Barker.

Charlotte revealed her sisters’ identities in an 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. She insisted they wrote “from the impulse of nature” and did not enjoy the daring themes their work explored. She called Emily “simpler than a child” and claimed Anne “wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister.” Her portrayal would dominate Emily and Anne’s reputations for generations.

Charlotte outlived all her siblings, dying at 38 in 1855, just nine months after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. Though her death certificate cites tuberculosis, she may also have suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, a pregnancy complication.

The Brontë siblings’ father Patrick, grief-stricken, petitioned the government to inspect the health conditions in Haworth. The results were shocking. “The Babbage Report found 41.6 percent of Haworth’s inhabitants died before the age of 6 and the average age of death was 25 years and eight months. Sewage from privies contaminated the well water,” says De Cuevas. In a Gothic twist, the inspector found the water at Haworth parsonage—where the Brontës dreamt up spectral characters like Heathcliff and Rochester—was tainted by improperly buried bodies in the graveyard.