A short life of the author
Anne Brontë has always been the least famous of the three Brontë sisters — overshadowed by Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights, her novels have been treated as the minor works of a major family. This is unjust. Anne Brontë’s two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), are remarkable achievements — the first a painfully honest account of the humiliations endured by a Victorian governess, the second a radical feminist novel about a woman who leaves her alcoholic husband that was the most commercially successful of all the Brontë novels on first publication and that anticipated by more than a century the feminist concerns of the twentieth century.
Haworth
Anne Brontë was born in 1820 at Thornton, near Bradford, the youngest of the six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, and his wife Maria. The family moved to the parsonage at Haworth in 1820, and Maria Brontë died of cancer in 1821. The two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in childhood. The four surviving children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — created elaborate fantasy worlds (Angria and Gondal) that became the apprenticeship for their later fiction.
Anne was the quietest and most devout of the siblings — she took her religion seriously in a way that Charlotte and Emily did not — but she was also the most practically experienced. She worked as a governess twice: first with the Ingham family at Blake Hall (1839) and then with the Robinson family at Thorp Green (1840–1845). These experiences were miserable — she was treated with condescension by her employers, ignored or bullied by her charges, and isolated from her family — and they provided the raw material for Agnes Grey.
Agnes Grey
Agnes Grey (1847) was published alongside Emily’s Wuthering Heights in a three-volume edition by Thomas Cautley Newby. It was the quieter and less noticed of the two books, but it is a small masterpiece of social realism — the story of a clergyman’s daughter who becomes a governess and discovers that the reality of the position is nothing like the genteel fiction of the governess novel. Agnes is patronised, underpaid, ignored, and powerless. The children she is supposed to educate are spoiled, cruel, and contemptuous. The novel’s power comes from its absolute refusal to sentimentalise or romanticise the governess’s experience — Anne wrote from life, and it shows.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) was Anne’s masterpiece and one of the most remarkable novels of the 1840s. Helen Graham, a mysterious young widow, moves into the ruined Wildfell Hall with her young son and supports herself by painting. The local farmer Gilbert Markham falls in love with her and eventually discovers, through her diary, the truth about her past: she married Arthur Huntingdon, a charming, dissolute man who became an abusive alcoholic, and she has fled him to protect her son from his influence.
The novel’s central act — Helen’s decision to leave her husband — was revolutionary. Under English law in the 1840s, a married woman had no legal existence separate from her husband. She could not own property, could not retain her own earnings, and had no legal right to custody of her children. Helen’s flight was an act of extraordinary courage and an implicit challenge to the legal and social structures that trapped women in abusive marriages.
Charlotte Brontë suppressed The Tenant after Anne’s death, refusing to allow it to be reprinted and calling it “an entire mistake.” Charlotte’s motives have been debated — some scholars believe she found the novel too raw and too confrontational; others argue that she was protecting Branwell’s reputation, since Huntingdon was widely read as a portrait of the dissipated Branwell Brontë.
Reassessment and the “Other Brontë” Problem
For more than a century, Anne was treated as the minor sister — competent but limited, a realist sandwiched between Charlotte’s romantic intensity and Emily’s visionary wildness. This judgement owed much to Charlotte’s intervention: by suppressing The Tenant and emphasising Anne’s gentleness and piety, Charlotte shaped a posthumous image of her youngest sister as a pale, dutiful figure whose talent was real but modest.
The feminist reappraisal of the 1970s and 1980s began to change this. Scholars like Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Langland, and Juliet Barker argued that Anne was in many ways the most radical of the three sisters — the one who engaged most directly with the social conditions of women, who wrote from experience rather than imagination, and whose second novel challenged patriarchal authority with a directness that Charlotte and Emily never attempted. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is now widely regarded as one of the first feminist novels in English, a work that anticipated the Married Women’s Property Act by decades.
Death
Anne died of tuberculosis at Scarborough on 28 May 1849, at the age of twenty-nine. She faced death with characteristic quiet courage. She is buried at St Mary’s Church, Scarborough — the only Brontë not buried at Haworth.
Collecting Brontë
Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights were published together in a three-volume edition (T.C. Newby, 1847); first editions are extremely rare and valuable — among the most sought-after Victorian novels. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Newby, 1848, 3 volumes) is separately published and equally scarce. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Aylott and Jones, 1846) — the siblings’ first publication — is one of the rarest and most valuable Victorian books.