Great dynasties of the world: The Brontës
Ian Sansom on three literary sisters and their 'hopeless' brother
Ian Sansom
Saturday 24 July 2010
F
or the Brontës of Haworth, west Yorkshire, 1847 was a big year. In October, Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre was published. "We can cordially recommend Jane Eyre to our readers," ran one enthusiastic review. "It is sure to be in demand." The reviewer was right. Two months later, both younger Brontë sisters also published novels: Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wuthering Heights was an instant bestseller. The Brontës – under their male pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – had achieved what they had always sought. Fame.
Everyone now has heard of the Brontë sisters, of course – the "three weird sisters", Ted Hughes called them. They have been memorialised in films and biographies, and their work is drummed into students at school and university. There are academic conferences, Penguin classics, box sets and leather-bound collectors' editions. Isabelle Huppert plays Anne in André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. Olivia de Havilland played Charlotte in the 1946 biopic Devotion. A 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights starred Juliette Binoche. Brontëana available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth includes jewellery, mugs and cross-stitch kits. But what of the fourth Brontë sibling, the only brother, Branwell? He was the fourth of the six Brontë children – two older sisters died young. As he was the only son, expectations were high.
The Brontës' father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had come a long way from a two-room cottage in Drumballyroney in County Down to study theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and then be appointed to a perpetual curacy in Haworth. Branwell was not expected to fail. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, claimed that Branwell was "a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent". Douglas A Martin, in his novel based on the brother Brontë's life, Branwell (2006), writes that "Childhood was Branwell's kingdom to rule over." It was: he and Charlotte collaborated as children in the invention of a complex fictional world they called Angria. It proved an ominous name.
As the sisters began to achieve recognition – a joint collection of their poems was published to critical acclaim in 1846 – Branwell sank deeper into depression and despair. He began drinking heavily, and taking laudanum. He had failed to gain admission to the Royal Academy, failed as a portrait painter, and had begun working variously as a tutor, and as a clerk at a railway station, posts from which he was dismissed for incompetence, or worse – in one case for conducting an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. Daphne du Maurier, in The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960), her brilliant and bizarre biography of Branwell, hints darkly at Branwell leading one of his young charges astray. Emily described her brother at this stage of his life as a "hopeless being".
Branwell's one and only famous painting is the only known portrait of the three sisters together: see left, now at the National Portrait Gallery. He had originally painted himself in the centre, but obliterated his image. The paint has faded, so that his ghostly presence now hovers ominously beside his sisters.
After Branwell's death in 1848, aged only 31, Charlotte wrote to her friend William Smith Williams: "I do not weep from a sense of bereavement – there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost – but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light."
The current exhibition on Branwell at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is titled Sex, Drugs and Literature.
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