The Illustrated Letters of the Brontës E-Book

Juliet Gardiner

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Illustrated Letters
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 274

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The story both of the real world of the Brontës at Haworth Parsonage, their home on the edge of the lonely Yorkshire moors, and of the imaginary worlds they spun for themselves in their novels and poetry. Wherever possible, their story is told using their own words – the letters they wrote to each other, Emily and Anne's secret diaries, and Charlotte's exchanges with luminaries of literary England – or those closest to them, such as their brother Branwell, their father Patrick Brontë, and their novelist friend Mrs Gaskell.  The Brontës sketched and painted their worlds too, in delicate ink washes and watercolours of family and friends, animals and the English moors. These pictures illuminate the text as do the tiny drawings the Brontë children made to illustrate their imaginary worlds. In addition, there are facsimiles of their letters and diaries, paintings by artists of the day, and pictures of household life.  This beautifully illustrated book offers a unique and privileged view of the real lives of three women, writers and sisters. 

Leseprobe

Thomas Girtin’s painting of the Yorkshire moors, Landscape with Hill and Clouds, painted in the 1790s. Compared with the paintings of Turner, Girtin’s iconography of the bleak, desolate isolation of the endless expanse of the moors came not only to represent the landscape of the Brontës’ lives, but its essence too, as Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte’s biographer, noticed when she first met her: ‘In general she sits quite alone thinking over the past … she has the wild, strange facts of her own and her sisters’ lives – and beyond and above these she has the most original and suggestive thoughts of her own: so that, like the moors, I felt on the last day as if our talk might be extended in any direction without getting to the end of any subject.’

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Road to Haworth

Chapter 2 Tales of Childhood

Chapter 3 A Suitable Situation

Chapter 4 The World Without

Chapter 5 Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

Chapter 6 Charlotte Alone

Family and Friends

In the Footsteps of the Brontës

Index

The Sources

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

‘WHEN MY CHILDREN WERE VERY YOUNG,’ recalled the Reverend Patrick Brontë, ‘… as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had discerned, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them to stand and speak boldly from under the cover of the mask.’

The poetry and novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have often been portrayed as the masks through which these daughters of the Parsonage spoke with ‘less timidity’, and revealed that they knew – and gave voice to – a great deal that others had not discovered about them, nor could imagine how they had discovered for themselves, given the narrow confines of their restricted lives.

In recounting the lives of the Brontës – ‘such a life as I never heard of before’, according to Charlotte’s biographer, Mrs Gaskell – it is rewarding to listen to the many voices in which they wrote. For the solitary lives which the three sisters and their brother, Branwell, lived with their austere clergyman father and reticent aunt, in the isolated, moor-lapped grey stone Parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire, threw them for lengthy periods of time almost entirely into each other’s company, voracious reading and protean writing.

The primary direct source for the Brontës’ lives is Charlotte’s correspondence. Apart from the sisters’ tragic first schooldays at Cowan Bridge, it was Charlotte who ventured first and most frequently into the ‘world without’. From Roe Head, where she went as a pupil in January 1831, Charlotte wrote only two known letters, one to her brother Branwell – ’as usual I address my weekly letter to you, because to you I find the most to say’ – but it was at Roe Head that she made two friends who were to become her lifelong correspondents: Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. They were entirely different in background and outlook and Charlotte’s relationship with each of them was different. To Mary, who was of the radical political persuasion of her family, independent, intelligent and outspoken, appealing to the rebellious side of Charlotte’s complex nature, only one letter survives, a long epistle Charlotte wrote after her friend had emigrated to New Zealand in 1845, about the first visit she and Anne had paid to her publishers in London. But something of the tenor of the correspondence can be gained from Mary’s response to the receipt of a copy of Jane Eyre in 1848:

The Brontë sisters in a group portrait painted by Branwell, c.1834, known as the ‘pillar portrait’. The space between Anne and Emily (far left and left) and Charlotte (right) was originally occupied by Branwell. At some point the artist painted himself out of his own portrait. The reason is not known. Perhaps Branwell was dissatisfied with his representation of his own face; perhaps he no longer felt the equal of his grave-faced sisters or part of their world. The oil painting was further damaged when it was cut from its frame by Charlotte’s husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, and taken back to Ireland with him after Patrick Brontë’s death, where it lay folded in a drawer for many years.

IT SEEMED TO ME INCREDIBLE that you had actually written a book. Such events did not happen when I was in England. I begin to believe in your existence much as I do in Mr Rochester’s. In a believing mood I don’t doubt either of them … You are very different from me in having no doctrine to preach. It is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production. Has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities? Did you never sneer or declaim in your first sketches? I will scold you well when I see you.

But Mary Taylor never had that opportunity; Charlotte died five years before she returned to England.

Charlotte first wrote to Ellen Nussey from Haworth during her first school holidays from Roe Head; her last letter was a scribbled pencil note from her deathbed. In the years between, hundreds of letters passed between the friends, and it is these which remain the chief source for the life of the Brontës. Charlotte wrote to Ellen of the small details of her daily life and that of her family; she wrote of her resentments at having to seek her living as a governess, all the privations that that entailed, and her envy of Ellen’s independence, her thoughts on the position of women, her feelings towards her sisters, her paralyzing grief at their deaths, her disappointment with her brother Branwell, who had ‘set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad’, which soon turned to despair. She described her depressions, her feelings of worthlessness and her religious crises, her loneliness, her sense of duty towards God and towards her father, and her feelings about love and about marriage, including her eventual marriage to the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls. She did not write to Ellen, who she recognized was ‘no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl’, of her inner life, the imagination that informed her writing, for she knew that:

An 1822 map of the West Riding of Yorkshire – the world of the Brontës. It shows Keighley, the nearest town, some four miles from Haworth, where the villagers had to go to seek ‘medical advice, for stationery, books, law, dress or dainties’, and where the Brontës walked to borrow books from the Mechanics’ Institute library; Bradford, the nearest city, where Branwell tried to make his living as a portrait painter; Guiseley, where Patrick and Maria Brontë were married; Mirfield, where Charlotte went to school at Roe Head; Birstall, where Ellen Nussey, the friend she met at Roe Head lived; Thornton, where Patrick Brontë was curate from 1815 to 1820 and where Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne were born; and Haworth itself, where ‘there were shopkeepers for the humbler and everyday wants’, and where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë spent nearly their entire lives.

I AM NOT LIKE YOU. If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me.

A few months after her marriage in 1854, Charlotte wrote to Ellen:

ARTHUR [BELL NICHOLLS] has been glancing over this note. He thinks I have written too freely … Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication, they always seem to think us incautious. I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything rash; however you must BURN it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept, they are as dangerous as lucifer matches, so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given, ‘fire them’ or ‘there will be no more’, such is his resolve … give him a plain pledge to that effect, or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence …

Ellen gave him her pledge, but she did not destroy the letters.

As well as her letters to Ellen, Charlotte wrote home to Emily during her year in Brussels expressing her unhappiness, but not the real reasons for that unhappiness; she wrote to her family from her various posts as a governess; she corresponded with friends she had made in Brussels and with her old headmistress from Roe Head, Miss Wooler. After the publication of Jane Eyre she replied to letters and reviews from the famous: G. H. Lewes, William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau, Mrs Gaskell; and whenever she undertook a trip to London, or a visit to her new-found literary friends, she wrote to her father about it. But in her later years, the person with whom Charlotte struck up a correspondence, equal in some ways in intimacy, but more concerned with writerly things, to that which she had with Ellen Nussey, was the reader at her publisher at Smith, Elder & Co., William Smith Williams, and to a considerable extent also with the head of the firm, George Smith. Although she always addressed her letters to both ‘My Dear Sir’, and signed them ‘respectfully’ or ‘sincerely’, perhaps it was to her publishers that a self-observation Charlotte had made many years earlier best applied: ‘I cannot be formal in a letter. If I write at all I must write as I think.’

On 16 April 1855, Charlotte’s friend of her brief years of fame, the novelist Mrs Gaskell, received an entirely unexpected letter from Patrick Brontë:

A letter Charlotte wrote in her characteristic slanting hand to her friend Ellen Nussey on 6 December 1836, on returning to teach at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head where she and Ellen had met as pupils in 1831. Charlotte has crosshatched the page with two sets of lines, possibly to save paper, but perhaps more probably out of consideration to Ellen since, prior to Rowland Hill’s Penny Post of 1840 which introduced a uniform postal rate paid in advance, letter were charged by the page to the recipient rather than the sender.

FINDING A GREAT MANY SCRIBBLERS … have published articles in newspapers and tracts – respecting my dear daughter Charlotte … and seeing that many things that have been stated are true, but more false … I can see no better plan under the circumstances than to apply to some established Author to write a brief account of her life – and to make some remarks on her works. You seem to me to be best qualified for doing what I wish should be done.

Mrs Gaskell had already been thinking of doing exactly that and so she immediately acquiesced in the Reverend Brontë’s ‘impetuous wish’ to make his daughter’s life known. Apart from the help from the Parsonage, Ellen Nussey contributed her memories of Charlotte, and lent Mrs Gaskell the 350 letters she had failed to destroy; Mary Taylor sent a long reminiscence from New Zealand; and other friends and acquaintances of Charlotte, servants of the family and the Haworth stationer, John Greenwood, shared their recollections and opinions. Mrs Gaskell ventured to Brussels where Mme Heger refused to see her, but M. Heger politely sketched his recollections of his two difficult English pupils, Emily and Charlotte. (He also showed Mrs Gaskell Charlotte’s letters to him, but, aware of the pain this could cause, she did not allude to them in her Life.) All these, added to the conversations she had had with Charlotte herself, and her letters, are the substance of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which was published in March 1857 to a chorus of praise, with the Athenaeum declaring: ‘As a work of Art, we do not recollect the life of a woman by a woman so well executed.’ Published, as it was, so soon after Charlotte’s death, it is properly part of the Brontë story.

Charlotte Brontë, painted sometime after 1840 by J. H. Thompson, a Bradford artist and friend of her brother, Branwell, from whom he seems to have borrowed money and run up considerable debts ‘of which my father and Aunt had no knowledge’.

Writing to her publisher after Emily’s death, Charlotte recounted how her sister declined to go out, saying ‘What is the use? Charlotte will bring it home to me.’ And as Charlotte in many ways reported the world to her sisters, so she interpreted her sisters to the world. She was the first artificer of the Brontë legend, interposing herself between the memory of her family and their critics. There are only a scattering of short letters from Emily and Anne, mostly notes to Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey, and a collection of often rambling, frequently raw and urgent, and sometimes lachrymose epistles from Branwell. We read of Emily, Anne and Branwell in the margins of Charlotte’s much better-documented life. But it is also possible to reclaim Emily and Anne from sources other than those refracted through the lens of Charlotte’s letters and commentaries, valuable though these are.

Emily and Anne wrote joint diary papers every four years of their adult lives. These moving documents, found after the sisters’ deaths, folded into a tiny black box, two or three inches long, used for pins, perhaps, or snuff, take a sounding of their lives on Emily’s birthday and intermingle a jumble of recent family events and that day’s happenings with projections and questions about the coming years in the lives both of the Brontë family and of the inhabitants of the imaginary lands of Gondal and Gaaldine which they created. These were the territories which Emily and Anne mapped from a potent mixture of facts and images garnered from paintings, books, newspapers and periodicals, just as Charlotte and Branwell created Angria from the same material. The poems, plays, stories and miniature magazines, which they wrote for and about their countries of the mind, have familiar landmarks: the Niger Delta, the Duke of Wellington, Byron, Queen Victoria herself; but these were colonized, transformed and vivified by the children’s imagination and present an alternative narrative of their childhood, the ‘web of sunny air’ they spun out of their quiet, restricted lives, as Charlotte showed in bidding farewell to Angria and her favourite character, Zamorna:

The ‘gun group’ portrait, an oil painting of the Brontë children by Branwell, c.1833. A photograph of the original of this painting has been discovered showing the picture in a poor condition; previously only a fragment of Emily in profile believed to be from this portrait was known (see here). It is conjectured that Arthur Nicholls found the painting a poor likeness of his wife Charlotte, Anne and Branwell, and destroyed the picture, saving only the portrait of Emily. This engraving is from a copy published in J. Horsfall Turner’s Haworth Past and Present (1879).

I OWE HIM SOMETHING,he has held

A lofty, burning lamp to me

Whose rays surrounding darkness quelled

And showed me wonders shadow free.

The books and poems that Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote when they grew up were likewise based on familiar landmarks and experiences, and whilst not being narrowly autobiographical – ‘You are not to suppose any of the characters in Shirley intended as literal portraits,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey. ‘It would not suit the rules of art, nor my own feelings to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate’ – the three sisters wove those experiences into works which addressed the central concerns of their lives as women. Charlotte drew an implicit contrast between her writing and that of Jane Austen on reading Emma in 1850:

HER BUSINESS IS not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and fully, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores …

That was not the Brontë way. Emily wrote:

NO COWARD SOULis mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

And Charlotte wrote in Jane Eyre:

WOMEN ARE SUPPOSED to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel … they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom had pronounced necessary for their sex.

And throughout their lives Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë did ‘do more’, in their writings: their letters, their juvenilia, their diaries and private papers, their poems and their seven published novels.

CHAPTER 1

THE ROAD TO HAWORTH

‘I DO NOT DENY’, wrote the Reverend Patrick Brontë to Mrs Gaskell on the publication of her Life of his daughter Charlotte in 1857, in which she had painted a less than flattering portrait of him, ‘that I am somewhat eccentrick [sic]. Had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I am now, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been.’

The man who was to father three daughters of genius was born on the day of the saint after whom he was named, 17 March 1777, the oldest of the ten children of Eleanor (or Alice, as she was often called) and Hugh Brunty, a farmhand of Drumballyroney, in County Down, Ireland.

He sketched his life for Mrs Gaskell:

SINCE, AT MR NICHOLLS’ REQUEST and mine, you have kindly consented to give a brief account of my daughter Charlotte’s life, I will state a few facts which, as her biographer, you might wish to know. For the gratification of those who might be desirous of knowing anything of me, I will in as few words as I can gratify their curiosity. My father’s name was Hugh Brontë. He was a native of the south of Ireland, and was left an orphan at an early age. It was said that he was of ancient family. Whether this was or was not so I never gave myself the trouble to inquire, since his lot in life as well as mine depended, under providence, not on family descent but our own exertions. He came to the north of Ireland, and made an early but suitable marriage. His pecuniary means were small – but, renting a few acres of land, he and my mother by dint of application and industry managed to bring up a family of ten children in a respectable manner.

Mrs Gaskell added her own observations to these bare facts, noting how ‘early [Patrick] gave tokens of extraordinary quickness and intelligence. He had also his full share of ambition.’ It was an ambition which had taken root in the cottage, with a corn kiln in the back room which Hugh Brunty used to supplement his meagre income. The family had moved there from the mud-floored hovel where Patrick had been born. Of necessity, they led a simple life, with plain fare of buttermilk and bread made from a mixture of Fadge potatoes and oatmeal; this induced heartburn in the young Patrick and, he thought, caused the dyspepsia that dogged his adult life.

The Mountains of Mourne, which were visible from the window of the earth-floored, whitewashed, two-roomed cottage in Drumballyroney, County Down, where Patrick Brontë (then Brunty) was born on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1777. The wild beauty of the mountains, slate blue in the distance, was a great attraction to Patrick who walked in the foothills and was pleased to find an echoing wildness in the Yorkshire moors when he came as a curate to Haworth.

Patrick’s love of God found expression in the magnificent landscape of his native land, but once in England studying for the ministry, he knew he would never live there again – he only paid one brief visit to his Celtic homeland in 1806 after his ordination.

An illustration from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684), one of the three books to be found in Patrick Brontë’s childhood home. Charlotte took the allegory of the pilgrim’s struggle as a text for Jane Eyre’s spiritual and moral ‘journey’ towards an earthly paradise in Mr Rochester’s house.

The Bruntys wore only woollen clothes made from wool spun, dyed and carded by Eleanor. Hugh had a fear of fire and forbade the wearing of linen or cotton, a fear which was never to leave his son Patrick, who was to insist on buckets of water on the landing in his own family’s home. It was not until Charlotte was a married woman that Patrick’s prejudices were disregarded and curtains were hung at the Parsonage windows at Haworth.

But although Hugh and Eleanor Brunty were virtually illiterate and gained what little knowledge they had of literature from the telling of Irish folk tales and hearing passages read aloud from books – perhaps by a visiting preacher or local schoolmaster – there were books on the cottage shelf: four. Patrick’s mother had her own small copy of the New Testament, whilst his father’s library consisted of the Bible, the poems of Robert Burns and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a work Patrick soon knew almost by heart.

A book was always in his hands as he trudged to his work as a linen weaver, and soon it was to be a volume that he had bought for himself with some hard-earned savings on the day that he was sent on an errand for his employer to Belfast: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Indeed it was the boy’s devotion to reading, and his tendency to declaim passages aloud as he walked along, that caught the attention of the man who was to become his first mentor, Andrew Harshaw, a Presbyterian minister and teacher, who gave Patrick the run of his library. Soon, Patrick was denying himself sleep and devouring the works of Ovid, Virgil, Homer and Herodotus, ruining his eyes for life with the poor light afforded him by a flickering rush. In 1793, Harshaw recommended his young protégé for a position at Glascar Hill Presbyterian School, where Patrick taught for five years, introducing the children of local rural families to a study of literature, history and the classics and sharing with them his passion for nature on long rambles in the nearby Mountains of Mourne.

In the autumn of 1798, the Reverend Thomas Tighe, a notable Methodist minister and friend of John Wesley, offered Patrick – now twenty-one and grown tall and angular, with auburn hair and intense, pale blue eyes – promotion. He was to teach at the much larger school at Drumballyroney, and tutor Tighe’s own children as well. It was whilst in this household that the young Brontë made a momentous decision; his ability as a teacher, his sense of awe at the natural world (a wonder which he was to instil in his daughter Emily) and his growing interest in and knowledge of theology, led in one direction: the pulpit.

In September 1802, with the £25 he had managed to save, Patrick Brontë set sail for England and Tighe’s old college, St John’s, Cambridge. After he left Ireland to serve God in England, Patrick returned home only once, though he sent his mother money scrimped from his earnings all her life; and he never brought his children to see their father’s homeland. It was not until Charlotte married another Irish clergyman, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, that she was to pay a visit to Ireland, only months before she died. But the legacy of Ireland was deep within Patrick: the wild beauty of the Mountains of Mourne which drew him to find their counterpart in the Yorkshire moors; the language and romance of Ireland, which he wove into his own poetry and into the Celtic myths and stories which he would recount to his children and which had such an effect on them all, Emily in particular; and the sense of apartness which was the topography of the young Brontës’ world. Although when Mrs Gaskell first met Patrick in the 1850s ‘he spoke with no trace of an Irish accent’, there were those Yorkshiremen who remembered that when he took his curacy at Dewsbury some forty years earlier, Patrick strode the parish in an Ulsterman’s blue linen frock coat, a shillelagh (or staff) in his hand, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. His mother had been a Roman Catholic who had converted to Protestantism on marriage. Patrick was to become a member of the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, whose clergy were strongly influenced by Methodism but dedicated to keeping their fire within the established Church as an antidote to popish ways. Among the young blades of Cambridge, Patrick rarely referred to his peasant background and he had to eke out his savings by working as a sizar, ‘fagging’ for the wealthier students, until, thankfully, through the good agencies of the reformer William Wilberforce, he secured an annuity of £10.

The library at St John’s College, Cambridge. Patrick Brontë entered St John’s – Wordsworth and Coleridge’s alma mater – on 1 October 1802. The college was also where his mentor, the Reverend Thomas Tighe, had been an undergraduate and it had a reputation for its strong representation in the divinity faculty. It was also ‘noted for its preponderance of Yorkshiremen’. Whilst at St John’s Patrick enlisted as a volunteer in the civilian corps, training with weapons to resist a possible Napoleonic invasion from across the Channel. One of his fellows-in-arms was the youthful Lord Palmerston, later to become prime minister.

It was while he was studying theology and classics at Cambridge that Patrick changed his name, first to Branty, then to Bronté, finally settling on Brontë, possibly following the example of one of his heroes, Lord Nelson, who had had that name bestowed upon him by the King of Naples.

In 1806 Patrick took Holy Orders in the Anglican Church and embarked on a series of curacies, taking up duties at Weathersfield in Essex, then Shrewsbury in Shropshire, before going to Yorkshire in 1809, first to Dewsbury, to serve as curate to the Reverend Buckworth, a hymn-writer of some acclaim (‘Great God and wilt thou condescend/To be my Father and my Friend?’), and then, in 1811, moving to Hartshead, a few miles away. It was here that the thirty-five-year-old curate met his future wife, Maria Branwell, a Cornishwoman from Penzance, who was on a visit to her uncle, John Fennell, a Yorkshire Methodist lay preacher and headmaster. She was, according to Mrs Gaskell:

Patrick was admitted to St John’s as a sizar, or servitor, to his more affluent fellow students, which reduced his fees both to the college and to the University of Cambridge. In addition, Patrick became an exhibitioner, the recipient of a fund established ‘for thirty of the poorest and best disposed scholars’, and received help from the Church Missionary Society Fund, an organization directed towards promoting promising recruits to the Church.

Woodhouse Grove, at Apperley Bridge, near Bradford, housed a school for the education of the sons of Wesleyan ministers. Its first headmaster, John Fennell, appointed Patrick Brontë, then a curate at Hartshead, some ten miles away, as an inspector to examine the pupils in Latin and the scriptures. Invited to dine with his employer, Patrick met Fennell’s niece, Maria Branwell, who had just arrived at the school to help out with the school’s sewing and mending, and to act as a companion to her cousin Jane.

EXTREMELY SMALL IN PERSON, not pretty but very elegant and always dressed with a great simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character, and of which some of her details call to mind the style of dress preferred by her daughter for her favourite heroines. Mr Brontë was soon captivated by this little, gentle creature, and this time declared it was for life.

Nearly thirty years later, Maria’s daughter, Charlotte, had the opportunity to evoke this ‘little, gentle creature’, as she recalled in a letter she wrote to a friend on 16 February 1850:

A FEW DAYS SINCE, a little incident occurred which curiously touched me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers telling me that they were mamma’s, and that I might read them. I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were yellow with time, all having been written before I was born. It was strange now to peruse for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang: and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that a mind of a truly fine, pure and elevated order. They were written to Papa before they were married. There is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense of gentleness about them that is indescribable. I wish she had lived and that I had known her.

The letters of Maria to Patrick – none of his to her remain –show a sensible young woman (Maria was twenty-nine when she met her future husband) with a strong sense of religious duty and piety – indeed Maria’s own writing was confined to an unpublished tract, The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns, which Patrick endorsed after her death: ‘The above was written by my dear wife, and is for insertion in one of the periodical publications. Keep it as a memorial of her.’ They also show someone of an ardent, loving – and sometimes teasing – spirit, and afford us a glimpse of the possibilities of happiness for ‘My dear saucy Pat’, as Maria once addressed her betrothed, which the subsequent years of suffering were to cloud:

Penzance, Cornwall, home of Maria Branwell. Though ‘sufficiently well descended’ to mix in good society, she jumped at her aunt’s invitation to Yorkshire.

Maria Branwell as a young woman, an unattributed portrait. Maria was twenty-nine, a gentle, religious woman, recently orphaned and with an annuity of £50, when she met Patrick. He was soon ‘captivated by this little, gentle creature, and this time declared that it was for life’.

Patrick Brontë as a young man. When Maria met him he ‘had the reputation in the neighbourhood of being a very handsome fellow, full of Irish enthusiasm, and with something of an Irishman’s capability of falling easily in love.’

NOW DON’T YOU THINK that you deserve this epithet, far more, than I do that which you have given me? [It is believed that Patrick had sneaked a kiss from Maria] I really know not what to make of your last; the winds, waves, and rocks almost stunned me. I thought you were giving me the account of some terrible dream, or that you had the presentiment of the fate of my poor box [the boat carrying a trunk of Maria’s possessions from Cornwall to Yorkshire had been smashed on to rocks in a storm at sea, and all her books, clothes and trinkets had been lost], having no idea that your lively imagination could make so much of the slight reproof conveyed in my last. What will you say when you get a real, downright scolding?

But even though he left no love letters. we know that Patrick was a wordsmith too, as his poem ‘Lines, addressed to a Lady, on her Birth-Day’, written for Maria at thirty, proves:

SWEET IS THE APRIL MORN …

Maria let us walk, and breathe, the morning air,

And hear the cuckoo sing …

The modest daisy and the violet blue,

Inviting, spread their charms for you.

How much enhanced is all this bliss to me,

Since it is shared, in mutual joy with thee! …

He was also adept at recounting tales of Ireland and of his moral beliefs in works like The Rural Minstrel, The Cottage in the Woods: or The Art of Becoming Rich and Happy – a sort of spiritual answer to Richardson’s worldly novel, Pamela – and The Maid of Killarney: or Albion and Flora: a modern tale; in which are interwoven some cursory remarks on Religion and Politics – his best work, which gives an insight into some of the family’s later behaviour: why the Brontë children were so reluctant to eat meat; why Charlotte never learned to dance until she went to Brussels; and why Branwell’s imbroglios with the low life of Yorkshire caused such consternation at the Parsonage.