The legacy of Patrick, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë, perhaps the most extraordinary family in the history of English literature, lives on in a quiet corner of County Down in Northern Ireland, where Carol Brontë has become curator of the Brontë Homeland Interpretive Centre at the former Drumballyroney Church and School House in Drumballyroney. Carol’s husband is James Wallace Brontë, the great-great-grandnephew of Patrick Brontë, whose daughters’ imperishable works include Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.
The name Brontë, Brunty, Prunty or O’Prunty, in various forms, has been associated with this part of Northern Ireland for over 200 years. The area of County Down that is now known as the Brontë Country lies to the south of Banbridge. It was here that Patrick Brunty, later Brontë, was born in a stone cottage in Emdale on St. Patrick’s Day in 1777.
His father, Hugh Brunty, a Protestant whose ancestors emigrated from the south, was renowned throughout the area as a mesmerizing story-teller, a talent inherited by his famous granddaughters. His mother, Eilis McClory, a Catholic, and a great local beauty, eloped with Hugh and married him on the day of her wedding to someone else.
As a boy, Patrick was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and toiled in the linen industry, but spent most of his earnings on books, and damaged his eyes in study by flickering rushlight. When his employer passed away, Patrick began teaching at Glascar School, and, later, at Drumballyroney School, a few miles away. A local minister, struck by his talent and knowledge, insisted on sponsoring his education, and had him enrolled in St. John’s College, Cambridge, England in 1802 to study theology.
It was at this time that he “improved” his name to Brontë, for reasons of social class, and to emulate his personal hero, Lord Nelson, the honorary Duke of Brontë, which is in Sicily. (The distinctive double dotted umlaut over the ‘e’ came later.) In 1806 Patrick was ordained, and was appointed Perpetual Curate at Hartshead in Yorkshire in 1811.
He published some poetry, and met Maria Branwell at the local Wesleyan School. She was from the craggy Celtic region of Cornwall, the Forgotten Coast, born in 1783 in Penzance. It was love at first sight, and they married, and moved to Thornton, West Yorkshire. Maria gave birth to a boy, Patrick Branwell, and five girls. They settled at the top of an enormously steep hill, in The Parsonage, between a graveyard and the trackless moors in the remote village of Haworth.
There, on the very rooftop of England, tragedy struck, and MariaBrontë died in 1821, crying out till the very end for her children. Her two precocious eldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, sent away to boarding school, quickly followed, snatched in early childhood after prolonged mistreatment by a brutal headmaster so memorably depicted in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, JaneEyre.
Frightened by the conditions of their school, Patrick brought the other girls home to the sanctuary of The Parsonage to be raised by their Aunt Branwell, and taught by himself. He provided them with a wealth of books, magazines, and daily newspapers, and seemed to let them do as they please. Abit of an eccentric, Patrick would announce the break of day by firing a pistol at the Haworth Church steeple.
Turning their backs forever on society, the young Brontës explored the silent country of heath and heather, with the boy, Branwell, navigating the inland sea of the moors, spinning in seclusion a “magic web in childhood,” organizing fantastic games, and secretly collaborating on a series of miniature books.
In time, aloof Emily (1818-1848) became an accomplished artist and musician. A “chainless soul,” and, like her father, an expert shot, she grew ever more mystical, and obsessed with the weather, steadily increasing her excursions with her siblings and a fierce mastiff, Keeper, that no one else could control.
Angelic Anne (1820-1849), like her father, took an interest in things religious, became enchanted with the great cathedral in York, and longed to visit the picturesque seaside of Scarborough.
Scholarly Charlotte (1816-1855), like her father, wore out her eyes in reading, spent endless hours at work on her paintings, and made plans to travel to the continent to study French.
Swashbuckling Branwell dreamed of literary and artistic fame(1817-1848), but, quite unlike his father, took to the drink.
The three sisters found employment for a while as teachers and governesses, sometimes reduced to sewing dolls for their employers, and detested the drudgery of it all, for, as Charlotte said: “A private governess has no existence.” Returning to The Parsonage, they decided to secure a measure of independence and make a name for themselves by writing.
One day, when Emily was out of the house, Charlotte had a quiet look through her private papers, and discovered a treasure trove of poetry. Aftera furious argument, the two patched up their differences and published a book of their poems. It sold two copies.
Then all three plunged into writing novels, by night walking round the room arm-in-arm taking turns reciting the latest episodes. Written under the pseudonyms Currer [Charlotte], Acton [Anne] and Ellis [Emily] Bell, from the first they were determined not to be judged simply as remarkable females. Indeed, until Charlotte broke her silence, the Victorian critics were completely at a loss to tell the sex of the authors, which, of course was precisely their intention.
The public took an immediate shine to the small, plain, eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre, and responded sympathetically to the self-effacing, long-suffering governess, Agnes Grey.
However, contemporary accounts show that readers had a bit of trouble sorting out the sturm und drang of Wuthering Heights, a darkly ferocious tale resting on a recondite, highly complicated structure, with more than 600references to the weather, all woven together with almanacs and phases of the moon! Reviews were somewhat mixed, to say the least. Such things had never been set down in a novel. And there were those who whispered that it was written by a woman!
In fact, it is most probable that Emily based the wild events ofWuthering Heights in part on an obscure local story, and some family legends; and the savage, unforgettable character of Heathcliff on newspaper accountsand pictures printed in the Illustrated London News of the famine Irisharriving in Liverpool in dire straits, halfdead from hunger, and speakingonly “gibberish” (i.e., the Irish language).
Her pen name, “Ellis Bell,” was a combination of her grandmother’s name, Eilis, and the middle name of her father’s Irish assistant, the Rev.Arthur Bell Nicholls, who was later to take his place in the Brontë legend.
No sooner was the initial tumult past than the baby of the family, Anne, surprised her sisters with yet another novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and when her latest heroine actually slammed the bedroom door in the face of her husband, all England reverberated.
Unfortunately, the Brontës scarcely lived long enough to answer their critics or reap their earthly reward, as one by one they succumbed to the dreaded scourge of tuberculosis.
Failing as a writer and portrait painter, in fact at everything he attempted, Branwell, frustrated and entirely eclipsed by his sisters’ burgeoning fame, declined into alcoholism and narcotics addiction, dying pitifully in September, 1848.
Deeply shaken by his death, Emily caught a cold walking back across the rain-soaked churchyard after the funeral, relentlessly sank, and stoically ceased to be just three months later in December.
Gentle Anne caught the fatal illness from Emily, quietly endured the inevitable with Christian fortitude, and, by the following spring, went to pick out a grave in her favorite spot, Scarborough, by the sea. Kind to the core of her being, with but two days on her earthly calendar, she refused to be drawn in a donkey cart that she might spare the tired draught animal any further fatigue.
Charlotte lived somewhat longer, finding brief happiness with the clergyman, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Marrying “a mere Irishman” over Patrick’s vehement objections, she went to Ireland for her honeymoon, stopping at theNicholls’ ancestral home, Cuba House, in Banagher. Returning to the Haworthmoors, she revisited the secluded waterfalls of her childhood’s delight on alark, was trapped in the rain, and caught a fatal chill.
Proud, stiff-necked, intransigent Patrick outlived them all, slogging through disasters, and only making way for death with the greatest reluctance in 1861. He was Charlotte’s “old favorite,” a true patriarch, and progenitor of a unique family.
The Brontë family home is preserved and maintained in England by theBrontë Society. The Parsonage at Haworth, on the unbounded moors of West Yorkshire, is now a beloved museum, and retains many of the family possessions. It has acquired an international reputation as a pilgrimage spot, and is the most popular tourist attraction in all of the U.K. after William Shakespeare’s home in Stratford.
In Brontë Country in County Down, the early life of Patrick Brontëand his splendid, star-crossed family can easily be followed through the picturesque landscape, historic buildings and ancient dry walls that survive within the Homeland.
The Brontë Homeland Drive starts at Drumballyroney Church, where Patrick preached his first sermon, and the School near Rathfriland, 10 miles south of Banbridge. Other sites along the drive include the Birthplace Cottage; the Glascar School where Patrick first taught; the Eilis McClory Cottage, the childhood home of Patrick’s mother; and the Brontë Homeland Picnic Site at Knockiveagh.
The Brontë homestead itself was bequeathed to Carol’s husband by his grandfather. “There are a large number of Brontë enthusiasts throughout the world,” says Carol. “I am confident that the Centre will one day become world-famous.”
In Ireland, further information about the ancestry of the endlessly fascinating Brontë family may be obtained by writing to: The Secretary of the Irish Branch of the Brontë Society, Muriel Greene, Drumarkin House, Rathfriland, Co. Down BT34 5LZ.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May/June 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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