Hothouse Flowers

In Haworth, West Yorkshire, the Brontë parsonage attracts devotees to the writings of sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Their father, Patrick, was a Church of England curate, and had the living of the parsonage. He was born in Ireland and his original name was Brunty. Two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died young from tuberculosis, probably contracted during their time at Cowan Bridge School, also called the Clergy Daughters' School, a notorious place even in the early 19th century. Effectively, it was a charity school for children of lower Middle Class clergy. Horrific passages in Jane Eyre recall the girls' time there.

Their mother, Maria, died of uterine cancer, and brother Branwell, named after his mother's family, after early promise died at 31 addicted to alcohol and opium.

The sisters published a book of poems under the pseudonyms, Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell. This was followed by the publication Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Charlottle's first novel, The Professor, based on her personally intense feelings for Constantin Héger while working as a governess in Brussels, was rejected. Undaunted, she set about writing what was arguably the best known of the sisters' writing, Jane Eyre.

At her brother's funeral, Emily was reported to have 'caught a cold', but it's more likely that she began to exhibit advanced symptoms of tuberculosis, and died less than two months after her brother. She was so emaciated that her coffin was said to be only 16 inches in width. The attending carpenter had to alter a child's coffin for the purpose.

Anne wasn't as celebrated as her other two sisters. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was prevented from being republished after her death by Charlotte. Charlotte wrote to her publisher that "Wildfell Hall hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer." This prevention is considered to be the main reason for Anne's being less renowned than her sisters, although now the novel is considered one of the first sustained feminist novels. Anne died of tuberculosis and was buried in Scarborough, with only one mourner at her funeral.

Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and soon became pregnant. She died after a long period of morning sickness, probably exacerbated by malnutrition and dehydration. Typhus was allegedly a contributing factor, most likely contracted from Tabitha Ackroyd, the Brontë household's oldest servant, who died shortly before Charlotte.

Water seeping through the graveyard on the slope outside the parsonage fed into the village's main water supply, and was probably the source of repeated typhus outbreaks. On their local errands, the sisters wouyld have walked past the earthen 'privy' by the roadside and open to public view. The dusty road, the stench of excrement, the bloody flux, are all woven into the Brontë narrative.

Patrick outlived them all, dying at the age of 84.  He was the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles, and various rural poems. Although he accorded his children great freedom and unconditional love, it's now considered that he embittered their lives due to his eccentric habits and peculiar theories of education.