Anne Brontë: The Forgotten Sister Who May Have Been the Bravest

For 150 years Anne Brontë was the "other one": the youngest, the mildest, the sister filed under also-wrote. That verdict – set, it must be said, partly by Charlotte herself – has collapsed in our lifetime. Modern readers and scholars have rediscovered Anne as arguably the most radical Brontë of all: the one who wrote about what she knew with documentary honesty, whose second novel confronted alcoholism, coercive marriage and a woman's right to escape decades before society was ready, and who faced her early death with a courage that still stops the heart. Her story also gives the Brontë pilgrimage its most poignant detour – because Anne alone lies far from Haworth, in a clifftop churchyard beside the sea she loved. Here is the forgotten sister, remembered properly.

The youngest of six

Anne was born on 17 January 1820 at Thornton, the last of the six Brontë children, and was carried to Haworth Parsonage at three months old. Her mother died before Anne turned two; she was raised largely by her aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, whose favourite she was, and grew up the quietest member of a loud-minded family – gentle, devout, and closer to Emily than to anyone alive. The two youngest sisters were, in the family's phrase, "like twins": it was Emily-and-Anne who split from Charlotte and Branwell's imaginary world to found their own kingdom of Gondal, which they were still elaborating together as grown women. But where Emily could not survive beyond Haworth, Anne possessed something none of her siblings could sustain: the ability to endure the outside world.

The working Brontë

Here is Anne's under-appreciated distinction: of all the Brontë children, she alone made a real, sustained career of employment. At nineteen she took a governess post with the Ingham family at Blake Hall – a nightmare of unteachable, uncontrollable children she was forbidden to discipline, transcribed almost verbatim into her first novel. Undeterred, in 1840 she secured a better position with the Robinson family at Thorp Green Hall near York, and held it for five years – longer than every job held by Charlotte, Emily and Branwell combined. Annual family holidays with the Robinsons took her to the seaside resort of Scarborough, and Anne fell permanently in love with the sea – the one passion that rivalled the moors in Brontë hearts. The Thorp Green years ended sadly: Anne had secured her brother Branwell the post of tutor there, and resigned in 1845, shortly before he was dismissed over his affair with their employer's wife – a family catastrophe Anne witnessed at close quarters and would transmute, unflinchingly, into fiction.

Two novels braver than their era

Agnes Grey (1847), published as by "Acton Bell" alongside Emily's Wuthering Heights, is the governess's life told plainly: the humiliations, the cruelty of privileged children, the powerlessness of the educated poor woman – fiction as sworn testimony. But it is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) that has driven Anne's modern revaluation. Its heroine, Helen, slams her bedroom door against a drunken, abusive husband – a slam heard round Victorian England – and then does the unthinkable: takes her child and flees, earning her own living in hiding. Drawn from Anne's ringside view of Branwell's alcoholic disintegration, the novel was a scandalous bestseller, condemned as coarse and unwomanly; Anne answered with a preface calmly defending a writer's duty to tell unpleasant truths. After her death, Charlotte – protective, and perhaps unnerved by the book – blocked its republication, beginning Anne's long eclipse. Today it is routinely called one of the first feminist novels, and Anne's stock has never stood higher. The manuscript treasures of all three sisters can be explored through the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which has led the modern restoration of Anne's reputation.

1849: the journey to the sea

The family's terrible winter – Branwell dead in September 1848, Emily in December – left Anne already ill with the same tuberculosis, and by spring 1849 she knew her case was hopeless. What she did next separates her from her siblings: where Emily refused all intervention, Anne, with steady clear eyes, chose how to meet death. She asked to be taken to Scarborough, to the sea she loved, reasoning that if the change could not cure her it would ease her – and sparing her father, who had now buried a wife and four children, the agony of another deathbed at home. With Charlotte and their friend Ellen Nussey she reached Scarborough on 25 May 1849, visited the beach, and drove a donkey-cart along the sands – taking the reins herself, characteristically, out of concern the donkey be treated gently. She died on 28 May 1849, aged 29, in lodgings on St Nicholas Cliff where the Grand Hotel now stands; her recorded last words, to her devastated sister, were "Take courage, Charlotte, take courage."

The grave above the bay

Charlotte buried Anne where she died: in St Mary's churchyard, high beneath Scarborough Castle, overlooking the South Bay – making Anne the only Brontë not laid in the family vault at Haworth. The grave became a pilgrimage site almost immediately and remains profoundly moving, with the sea glittering beyond the headstone. There is even a characteristically Brontë postscript of sorrow and error: the original stone contained mistakes – Charlotte returned to have it corrected, yet an error persisted, giving Anne's age as 28 rather than 29, and in 2013 the Brontë Society installed a bronze plaque beside the weathered stone setting the record straight. Visitors to the Yorkshire coast will find the churchyard an easy, unforgettable stop; wider trip-planning help is at yorkshire.com.

Giving Anne her due

On our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum six guests – we make a point of restoring Anne to the centre of the family story, because guests consistently tell us hers is the thread that moves them most: the quiet one who worked, endured, told the truth before the world wanted it, and died instructing others to take courage. Read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall before your trip if you can. Then come to Brontë Country and meet the sister the twentieth century forgot – and the twenty-first, rightly, will not.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.