History

         Haworth Parsonage - Home of the Brontës  ©Ken Biggs

Once upon a time a man called Patrick married a woman called Maria. She was six years younger than him. Eighteen months after the wedding, their first daughter was born. She was named Maria after her mother. Little over a year later, the couple welcomed a second daughter who they called Elizabeth.

Four more children followed in quick succession. The third child, another daughter, was called Charlotte. Next came a son who was christened Branwell for that was his mother's maiden name. A year later Emily arrived and eighteen months after her came another daughter - christened Anne.

They were the Brontë family and in the first half of the nineteenth century they lived together in the Pennine village of Haworth, here in Yorkshire. Patrick Brontë was the local vicar. Mum and Dad with five daughters and a son - how happy and fruitful they should have been.

But then the deaths began to happen. Maria, the mother, was the first to go in 1821 at the age of just thirty eight. Then Maria, the daughter, died at the age of eleven in the late spring of 1825 followed six weeks later by Elizabeth (aged 10).

Twenty three years passed before the family was struck by another tragedy. Branwell died at the age of 31 in September 1848 and later that same year Emily died at the age of thirty.

The very next year Anne died in Scarborough at the age of twenty nine and on the last day of March in 1855, Charlotte died at the age of thirty eight. The final member of the Brontë family to die was The Reverend Patrick Brontë himself who breathed his last breath at the age of eighty four in 1861.

None of the Brontë children had children of their own though Charlotte was pregnant at the time of her passing. Mostly, the Brontës succumbed to diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis though Branwell's alcoholism played a part in his early departure.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne were brilliant young women as the writings they  left behind demonstrate. With good health and more decades of life they would have undoubtedly left an even richer literary legacy behind them.

When it was announced in 2013 that the first female literary figure to grace a British banknote  would be Jane Austen, I must admit that I felt quite miffed. I wanted it to be Charlotte, Emily and Anne - partly because I find the writing of Jane Austen to be tiresome in its polite reserve, its comfort and curtailment. There is something much freer and forward looking in the works of the three Brontë sisters - or maybe I am a little biased because they were Yorkshire puddings like me.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/c5gnJja