Anne Brontë – why should you read her?

This week, after a series of excellent talks at the Brontë Society conference, I wanted to explain – what is it we all see in ‘the other Brontë sister’? Last year was Anne’s bicentenary, and the weekend was an opportunity not merely to celebrate, but also to reappraise her among a community of Brontë fans. What does that have to do with you, though? Is she really worth the time investment for the less-than-hardcore Brontë readers and the casual literature buffs?

Anne’s reputation is a strange mix – the most feminist Brontë, the most devoutly religious of the family, the meek and mild youngest sister. Although there was a consensus among the conference attendees that Anne’s work was interesting, nuanced, and varied, she is – still – the least read of the sisters, and perhaps that mixed reputation is why people don’t choose to read her. All of those things are deeply evident in all her work, which is introspective, spiritual, and discusses the darkness that befell a Victorian woman if she married wrong or had to work for a living. It was scandalous at the time, and remains shocking now – her descriptions of coercive control by husbands and mothers pushing daughters into bad marriages remains unparalleled, and regrettably relatable.

Anne was the first of the sisters to circulate a manuscript – ‘Agnes Grey’ – among publishers (although not the first to be published). Her work sold well, but was outsold by Emily’s more dramatic Wuthering Heights – although when ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ was published, it ‘reverberated among Victorian England’: the controversy of a woman rejecting her feckless husband was unavoidable, and caused Anne to write an introduction swearing to its truth and lack of exaggeration. Her novels were published in quick succession, within a year of one another. The next year, Anne was dead from consumption – her legacy the work she had left behind. This legacy was affected by Charlotte, her only remaining sister and a novelist with her own voice, choosing to edit ‘Agnes Grey’ and supress ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, for reasons unknown but widely speculated on. This one action continues to affect how Anne is read in comparison with Charlotte and Emily – ‘Tenant’ is the novel which sold better, whose impact was greater, and by removing it from circulation Anne seemed like a woman who had written only a preachy, parochial romance between a governess and a curate. Without the context of the more outspoken work, this is what ‘Agnes Grey’ became, with people choosing not to see the radicalism of her religious thought or depiction of women. ‘Tenant’ was re-published in 1854, a year before Charlotte’s own death, but without the fanfare or furore it had seen during Anne’s lifetime, and was instead slowly lost to history. Anne became a ‘Brontë sister’ rather than a writer in her own right.

Alongside her novels is a wealth of poetry – including poetry written on her deathbed wrestling with a terminal illness. Even terminally ill, though, Anne cannot be pinned down – aware of the likelihood of her own death, Anne fought to travel to the coast, telling her sister Charlotte that it was her only hope of recovery. She, as a consequence, died in Scarborough – and leaves us in awe of the assertive power of the youngest Brontë, described by her publisher as “a rather subdued person”, yet clearly not wishing of the “protection” he said her demeanour invited. Anne’s letters of this time tell us of her frame of mind: she was not afraid of death. “If I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect … But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.” Her poetry explores complex feelings – anger, regret, yearning – around life.

Fundamentally, Anne’s work is transparent: it doesn’t require careful scholarship to see the moral points she’s making and, compared to other Victorian writers such as Thomas Hardy or her sister Emily, Anne’s prose is easy to understand and her plots easy to follow. Her characters, even when they are in situations so fundamentally alien to us, are paragons without being aspirational – they pray for calm but still get agitated, which makes them relatable even for a modern reader. Perhaps this is one of the reasons she isn’t canonical – old-fashioned teachers don’t like things that their students can understand without prompting.

If you’ve read the Brontës, it’s most likely one of the novels by Emily or Charlotte – Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – that are the most adapted and most taught works by the sisters. The sisters’ poetry is woefully under-studied, and Anne’s novels tend only to be read as a second thought. It was in that way that I came to Anne: in a quest to read all of the Brontës’ works, I did not enjoy Vilette, and turned to Anne as my last remaining hurdle. I found her surprising – easy, compelling, dramatic. She is as if Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote ‘Jane Eyre’ – wry, investigative, scandalous, and yet very clearly religiously motivated. Anne’s books, unlike Charlotte and Emily’s, do not have the laser focus on the self, giving only the briefest descriptions of childhood and instead – like a modern work – skipping to the moment that the book is set in. Anne describes her heroines as ‘plain’, like Charlotte, but it is incidental rather than character-defining, and her role as a governess does not put her in a dramatic and romantic situation but rather is the focus of her daily life and weekly routines. ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ even has – like many modern YA novels – two narrators that it switches between, both withholding information from her reader and creating dramatic irony with a skilful interplay between the pair. Anne’s happy endings are hard won but, unlike in Charlotte or Emily’s books, her characters strengthen internally rather than changing in response to difficult circumstances. She, like her sisters, writes Bildungsroman – but her interpretation of the genre is so fundamentally different to theirs, it’s almost unfair to compare them.

There’s not a simple reason that Anne is the least read Brontë, but there also isn’t a good one. We can’t ascribe it all to elitism in academia or Charlotte’s revisionism, but without a reason to forget her we should be disregarding our collective relationship with Anne based on unfounded and unfair history. We should be looking at Anne’s work for its own merits – and that’s why you should read her. If you’re a Brontë fan there’s a good chance you’ll like her style (she did, after all, share many influences with Charlotte and Emily) – but regardless of where you’re coming from, she writes compelling and dramatic stories, which were bestsellers for a reason, and heartfelt, genuine poetry. You should read Anne for who she is – rather than for who her sisters are.

On This Topic:

• Any excuse to look at the comic – you know the one
• This incredible NPG cushion – Anne is on the left
• This gorgeous tribute to Coralie Bickford-Smith‘s Brontë book covers

To-Do:

• Contact DT – schedule a call
• Transfer files between laptops
• The apps I have saved on my computer – get your shit together

Today’s Culture:

• Making Japanese rice balls – an easy, healthy, cheap and transportable lunch to have on the go. I haven’t quite worked out defrosting them yet, though.
• Sally Rooney. Rather than buying into Beautiful World, Where Are You mania (as if I’m not going to the popup on the weekend…), I’m reading Conversations With Friends. Hopefully it won’t affect me quite so much as Normal People…
• My own talk on Anne from the Brontë Society conference (video forthcoming)