lived to adulthood, and Charlotte outlived them all. Emily Brontë tends to be the most beloved in the family, but Anne and Emily had much in common. They also had many differences; their personalities could not have been more dissimilar. And all three aspired to be writers.
To make family dynamics even more complex, their father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, a failed writer himself, saw Emily as a genius, Charlotte as very talented, and Anne as not worthy of attention. The truth is, however, that the self-absorbed and somewhat silly patriarch had a staggering amount of talent under his roof. To have one daughter become a famous writer is amazing enough, but to have three is almost unimaginable.
The reverend proved more successful in theatrics, at least at home. In constant possession of a pistol, he shot through the open door if irritated and took a knife to one of his wife’s silk dresses. When his wife died in 1821, he sent for his sister-in-law to care for the six children (there was one brother, Branwell). A few years later, all the girls except Anne were sent to boarding school, which turned out to be a horrible experience of physical deprivation; this is where the two oldest girls died. After their sisters’ deaths, Charlotte and Emily were sent home.
Typically for the period, Reverend Brontë pinned his hope on his son, Branwell, an aspiring artist. Branwell was sent to university in London to pursue his dreams and failed miserably. Instead, he squandered his tuition and allowance on gin. When he had run through all of the money, he returned home, telling lies about having been robbed. The sisters ended up as teachers and governesses, but their passion was always writing.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered that Anne and Emily had been writing verse, as had she. She collected their poetry into one volume and published it herself, using the male pseudonyms—Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell—that they would retain throughout their careers. The book sold one copy. Not to be deterred, they all continued writing. Soon they were publishing to great acclaim.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre achieved spectacular success during her lifetime, and it has survived the test of time and been retold again and again in films. She also penned the well-received novels Shirley and Villette. Anne’s Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are less known now but were critical and popular successes in their day.
But it is Emily who is considered by critics to be the literary genius of the family, based on her poems and her opus Wuthering Heights, which shone with a brilliance and sense of drama and mystery nearly unmatched in all of British literature. Family and friends marveled that sweet-natured Emily, always cleaning and ironing, was capable of the volcanic passions and drama she unleashed in her tale of love on the moors. Her Heathcliff is a brute, a primal presence as wild as the wind, a perfect foil for the spoiled, difficult Catherine. When it came out that the author was a woman, some critics of the day declared that Wuthering Heights must actually be the work of Branwell, on the grounds that no woman, particularly one who led such a sheltered existence, could have written such a passionate book.
Emily and Anne died young (at her brother’s funeral, Emily caught the cold that would eventually kill her). Charlotte went on to be lionized as a literary giant and hobnobbed with the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold. She married her father’s curate in 1854 and died the following year.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading;
It vexes me to choose another guide.
Emily Brontë
ALICE JAMES sibling rivalry
Baby sister to brainy overachievers William and Henry James, Alice James, born in 1848, was also a writer of intensity and introspection. But she suffered greatly as a product of the Victorian Age: her brothers were the recipients of all the glory, and Alice was relegated to the house. Given the times, despite her great familial connections, Alice had little chance of publication and gradually receded into the shadows of the brothers’ gargantuan reputations as geniuses in philosophy and fiction.
Alice was sick her whole adult life. Sadly, it seems that her frustrations about career and gender contributed to her illness and neurasthenia. She had her first spells at sixteen and was prescribed a regimen of treatments involving “blistering baths,” electricity treatments, and sulfuric, ether, and motor therapy sessions. These medical advancements didn’t seem to help so much as harm her, and she was depressed and suicidal by the age of thirty. Her father, a Christian mystic preacher and ambitious intellectual, magnanimously gave her “permission” to die, which lessened her interest in that option. The more sensitive sibling, novelist Henry James, noted that “in our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance” and that his sister’s “tragic health was, in a manner, the only solution for her of the practical problems of life.” Alice and her longtime companion Katherine Peabody were the models for Henry James’s novel about a pair of suffragist lovers in The Bostonians.
Despite her ill health, she did manage to keep a diary. Published after her death, it is now regarded as a seminal text in nineteenth-century feminist studies and a window into the world of invalidism. Nearly forgotten until the mid-1980s, Alice James has recently come to the attention of critics: a volume of her letters and an in-depth biography recognize her as a “silenced” voice of her era and tell a tragic tale of a woman trapped in a time in which the role of wife was the only real choice for women. Her long period of decay and isolation led her to view her eventual death from breast cancer as a respite from a torturous existence that offered no option to exercise her talent or will.
A written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way, and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations, and reflections which ferments perpetually….
From The Diary of Alice James
AMY LOWELL “maker of fine poems”
Sometimes, a strong woman following her own distinct destiny becomes better known for her strength of personality and the celebrity surrounding it than for her actual accomplishments. Amy Lowell is just such a person.
Born in 1874 at the tail end of the Gilded Age, she came from a family of accomplished intellectuals and writers; she was cousin to the legendary New England poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell and nearly every other male running MIT or Harvard. As a girl, she agonized over her weight, and despite desperate and severe diets, she couldn’t surmount that personal issue. Her fears about her ability to fit in led to “nervous prostrations,” but her love of the written word kept her going. “I am ugly, fat, conspicuous & dull,” she wrote in her diary at the age of fifteen. “I should like best of anything to be literary.”
Though she was in her own right a skilled critic and a fine poet, her recognition came in large part for her eccentricities—in particular, wearing tailored men’s suits, smoking cigars, and keeping a pack of dogs. Her original approach to both her appearance and her personal habits certainly extended to her writing, and after her first traditionally lyric book of poetry in 1912, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, she began working in the pioneering modernist and imagist style brought to international attention by Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot.
Indeed, Amy Lowell cited H. D. as a major influence on her open verse and cadence, what she referred to as “polymorphic prose.” She also had a fascination with Asian art, poetry, and aesthetics, and in 1921 published Fir-Flower Tablets, a group of original poems combined with avant-garde translations of Chinese poetry in collaboration with Florence Ayscough. A powerfully insightful literary critic, she also lectured, compiled anthologies of poetry by H. D. and others, and completed an immense biography of the great English poet John Keats.
Part of her legacy as a writer includes a group of love poems called The Letter
