The Brontës
Brian Wilks1975

The three Brontë sisters have left us no more than seven novels and a handful of poems, yet they are, next to Dickens, the most celebrated novelists of the nineteenth century. The daughters of Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman, and Maria Branwell, a Cornish gentlewoman, they were brought up in Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In this harsh and gloomy village, where the parsonage overlooked the over-used graveyard, Maria Brontë survived for only two years, leaving six children in the care of a grieving father.
At the age of eight Charlotte, with her older sisters Maria and Elizabeth, was sent to a subsidized boarding school for the daughters of clergymen, a frightful institution which killed her sisters - and might have killed her but for the prompt actions of her father. (The institution was immortalized - and damned forever - in Jane Eyre). For the next few years the four remaining children - Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne - turned in upon themselves and created imaginary worlds which they recorded in handwriting so minute as to be almost unreadable.
But this self-imposed apprenticeship, though it produced a great deal of writing, would never in itself have done more than provide a discipline. And the sisters' lives, a continual struggle against ill-health and defeated spirits, were hardly ever extended beyond the world the daughters of a country parson might know in the middle of the nineteenth century. Even Charlotte's experience of Brussels brought her little more than unhappiness. There was not the slightest hint that out of their apparently meagre experience and discouraging environment would come, in 1847, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.

Titre original : The Brontës (1975)