Insider info: many hardcore Janeites consider Anne their favorite Brontë, because she is more aligned with Austen aesthetically and morally than her sisters were.īut the best explainer of Anne Brontë’s awesomeness is Anne herself.
It reads like a minor Austen mashed up with a minor Brontë, which isn’t such a bad combo, after all. Brontë biographer May Sinclair is widely quoted as saying “the slamming of Helen Huntingdon’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated through Victorian England.” Rather than a tragic case of Victorian womanhood sacrificed (which was a pretty popular trope back then), Helen becomes the hero of her own story.Īgnes Grey, Anne Brontë’s first novel, feels less complete than Tenant, but if you like good 19th-century prose and stories about abused governesses and kindly clergyman, which I decidedly do, then it’s absolutely worth your time. Basically, all the Brontës, even Anne, lived an intense and drama-filled life.Įventually Tenant’s heroine, Helen, leaves her husband, which is an act very few other 19th-century novelists, including Anne’s sisters, dared to depict. Patrick’s affair with a married woman seems to have led to Anne giving up her governess post. This is all complicated by historical tidbits: that Charlotte sneered at Anne’s work, and that their alcoholic brother, Patrick, was an inspiration for all of their flattering and unflattering portraits of such brooding, sinister love interests. Its twist on the Byronic hero is decidedly more pragmatic than her sisters’, presenting first the charms of a dark hero like Rochester or Heathcliff and then undoing them by showing in great detail Arthur Huntington’s descent into abuse, alcoholism, and death. The historical basis for Anne’s critique of her sisters’ heroes is in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s second and most-lauded novel, a genuinely excellent and important part of the 19th-century canon. They chide her for her lack of taste, and sales. Nothing sums up her relationship to her sister’s work better than the Hark, a Vagrant comic called “Dude Watching with the Brontës,” which features Emily and Charlotte gazing adoringly at “Byronic heroes” as they walk by while Anne shakes her head like they’re crazy and calls the guys alcoholic dickbags and assholes. Anne lacked her sisters’ wild romanticism and affinity for dark heroes, but she had a strength and gift all her own, and leaves a strong feminist literary legacy. But this is a simplistic reading of her life. She’s known as the forgotten Brontë sister, or the one with less talent compared to preternatural geniuses Charlotte and Emily. Anne Brontë, born on January 17, 1820, is often the butt of Brontë jokes.
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