This past weekend I had the opportunity of taking a trip to Haworth, Yorkshire to explore the home of the Brontë sisters. My research centres upon Anne Brontë and the unique forms of radical politics and literary innovation in her writing indebted to her complex philosophical, political, and theological beliefs. Central to my research is bringing Anne to the forefront of literary and political history, a rightful place to which she has often been marginalised. Anne's novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published under the pseudonym, Acton Bell, created quite a stir in her time, selling so rapidly, a second edition was published before the year was out. Her bold representations of domestic abuse, the injustice of Victorian marital laws as well as her advocation for women's inclusion in education likewise to men, led to considerable virulence in the press, with many making claims of impropriety, should the author be a woman. Her response was a bold feminist preface printed with the second edition. In the half a century following Mary Wollstonecraft's contentious Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Anne was, in 1848, among the first women writers to publically assert intellectual gender equality:
'All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.'
Why, then, has Anne been cast to the side? Indeed, when the feminist writer Virginia Woolf praised the greatness of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Anne was left completely unmentioned. The reasons for this are complex. A central aspect I have recently been considering is the mythologisation of the Brontës. As Lucasta Miller describes in her book, The Brontë Myth, the Brontës became a cultural phenomenon in the decades following Charlotte's death. From the continual re-writings of Charlotte since Elizabeth Gaskell's biography to the twentieth-century cult of a mystically inspired Emily, the Brontë story has come to exist in the public imagination in a way almost separate from their writings. The 1960s 'purple heather' school of Brontës biography were a series of stagings of the same melodrama: desperate, handwritten manuscripts, the tempestuous windswept moors, the Gothic impossibilities striding bolding across the page; and the tiny isolated village where three unassuming women bent over their desks. This idea of the Brontës and their reception in culture is closely related to my concern with considering Anne anew. Thus, I have been considering how Anne's unflinching commitment to real-world truth and her uncompromising beliefs have ironically led to her presentation as the didactic, dull, and moralistic sister in contrast to the mythologised Charlotte and Emily. Moreover, this mystical, apolitical mythologisation is impossible to apply to Anne due to her firmly unambiguous politics and truth-telling mission concerning the real world.
'My object in writing the following pages was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.'
My trip to Haworth offered an illuminating glimpse into the real world of the Brontës. I experienced the beautiful landscape that so keenly informed their writings, I walked through the tightly bound Church community in which they lived each day, I even saw the very table and the writing desks that they used in writing their great novels. But perhaps the most rewarding discovery was seeing, too, how they were, at heart, simply human. I saw their letters, their childhood drawings, their scribbles in lesson books and on walls; I saw Charlotte's annotations in The Aeneid alongside a letter to her best friend about a trip to London and a new pair of gloves. I saw a lock of Anne's light brown hair bound in a plait, kept by her father after her death. The most moving thing I saw on my entire trip was a simple biblical verse sampler by a ten-year-old Anne with her name signed at the bottom.
And the power of the world itself, of reality in all its shades is captured by Anne in her writings. The mythologising of the Brontës has made Charlotte and Emily preternatural figures in the imagination and has overcast Anne, making her a forgotten pioneer. As the twentieth-century novelist, May Sinclair wrote dismissively of Anne, 'she had none of the superb unconscious of genius'. Though Sinclair praises the unmistakable force of Anne's writing, she subordinates her to the Romantic poetics idea of the 'genius' which she ascribes to her mythologised sisters.
But, of course, the truth about Anne and her sisters is that they were as real as you and I. The Romantic idea of the 'genius' is nothing compared to their truly human unwavering courage, fortitude, and resilience. They were not superhuman, transcendent beings, like Emily's heroine Catherine Earnshaw, but more like Anne's, unassuming but tremendous heroine, Agnes Grey. Anne's writings may have been lost amid the stormy myths of the Brontës, but as I walked down from Haworth Church, twenty-first-century footsteps upon Victorian cobbles, I thought to myself how in that very human courage and unwavering conviction by which she sought to change the world, with the voice that made Anne so different, she had created something that would always matter, a hope that could never be forgotten.
I would like to sincerely the Laidlaw Foundation for providing me with the funds to make this illuminating trip possible.