Most visitors to Haworth come for Charlotte and Emily. They come for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, for the famous portraits and the famous graves, for the literary legacy that has made the Brontë name one of the most recognisable in English literature.
Anne Brontë is usually the footnote. The third sister. The one who wrote Agnes Grey and that other one — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, wasn't it? The one who died youngest.
This guide is an attempt to correct that. Anne Brontë wrote two novels in the six years before her death at 29. Both are significant. One of them — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — is by some measures the most radical novel written by any of the three sisters, and it was suppressed by Charlotte after Anne's death because Charlotte found it too stark.
Anne Brontë was born on 17 January 1820 in Thornton, near Bradford — the last of Patrick and Maria Brontë's six children. She was five months old when the family moved to Haworth and the youngest of the four surviving children when her two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in 1825.
Anne was the quietest and most outwardly conventional of the four surviving siblings. Charlotte was the leader, Emily the visionary; Branwell was the damaged one; Anne was the one who held herself together, who managed difficulty without drama, who did the work that needed doing. This quality — resilience without display — runs through both her novels.
She worked as a governess at two households: Blake Hall in Mirfield (1839) and Thorp Green Hall near York (1840–1845). Her experiences at both establishments fed directly into Agnes Grey. She left Thorp Green in 1845 partly because of her distress at the affair between her employer, Mrs Robinson, and her brother Branwell — an affair that contributed significantly to Branwell's destruction.
Anne died on 28 May 1849 in Scarborough, where she had gone hoping the sea air would help her tuberculosis. She was 29. She asked to be buried in Scarborough rather than Haworth. Her grave is in St Mary's churchyard, above the harbour.
Agnes Grey was published on 19 December 1847 — the same day as Emily's Wuthering Heights and three months after Charlotte's Jane Eyre. It is a short novel, barely 200 pages, and it tells the story of Agnes Grey's experiences as a governess in two wealthy households.
The novel is remarkable for its honesty. The households Agnes works for are not idealised — the children are cruel, the parents are indifferent or actively unpleasant, and the social position of a governess — educated, but not a family member and not a servant — is examined without softening. Agnes's patience and dignity in the face of consistent humiliation is not sentimentalised. It is simply described.
The novel drew directly from Anne's own experience at Blake Hall and Thorp Green. The correspondence between the novel's events and the known facts of Anne's employment is close enough that Agnes Grey functions partly as a primary source for her biography as well as a work of fiction.
Charlotte dismissed Agnes Grey as slight. Most modern critics regard this assessment as significantly mistaken.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in June 1848 — fourteen months before Anne's death. It is the novel that most clearly establishes Anne as a major writer rather than a talented minor one.
The novel tells the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious young woman who arrives at the ruined Wildfell Hall with her small son and refuses to discuss her past. The novel's narrator, Gilbert Markham, eventually discovers that she has fled from a brutal marriage — a husband whose alcoholism, infidelity and cruelty have made her home an unsafe environment for herself and her child.
The depiction of the marriage — the escalation of abuse, the social pressures that prevent escape, the legal impossibility (under 1840s law) of a wife leaving her husband and retaining custody of her children — is extraordinarily direct for 1848. The novel was a bestseller immediately; it was also controversial. Some reviewers found the depiction of drunkenness and moral dissolution too detailed for a female author to have written.
Charlotte, acting as literary executor after Anne's death, refused to authorise a second edition. She wrote that Anne had been "too little acquainted with the world" to write about these subjects — a remarkable statement given what Anne had witnessed at Thorp Green. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was effectively suppressed for several decades.
The novel has been reassessed significantly in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is now commonly described as the first feminist novel in the English literary tradition — a characterisation that, while perhaps simplifying a complex text, captures something essential about what Anne was doing.
The comparison with Emily is instructive. Emily's vision in Wuthering Heights is mythic — the moors, the obsession, the wildness are all operating at a pitch that has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with a kind of literary extremism. The novel is extraordinary. It is also, in the most literal sense, fantastic — nobody lives like the people in Wuthering Heights.
Anne's vision is realist. The people in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall live, recognisably, like the people Anne observed. The abuse is not Gothic; it is domestic. The cruelty is not supernatural; it is the ordinary cruelty of a society that gave a husband complete legal power over his wife. The novel asks what happens to a woman in that situation, and it answers the question without flinching.
This is a different kind of courage from Emily's. It is the courage of the person who describes the thing as it actually is.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum treats all three sisters with equal seriousness, and the recent critical reassessment of Anne's work is well reflected in the museum's interpretation. The debate about whether Charlotte deliberately suppressed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — and why — is one of the more interesting questions in 19th-century literary history.
Anne's grave in Scarborough — the only Brontë family grave not in Haworth — is a place of significant literary pilgrimage, though it receives fewer visitors than the Haworth churchyard. The harbour view from St Mary's churchyard is one of the finest in Yorkshire.
The Brontë Country Day Trip focuses primarily on Haworth and the moors above it. Anne's story — her work, her experiences as a governess and the suppression of her most important novel — is told throughout the day. Book here.
Planning a Brontë Country day? These go well together:
29.
Two — Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — both written in the six years before her death.
She found the novel too stark.
