Who Were the Brontë Sisters? The True Story of Literature's Most Remarkable Family

It remains one of the most improbable stories in the history of books: three unmarried daughters of a country parson, living in a grey stone parsonage on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, produced – almost simultaneously – some of the most passionate, revolutionary novels ever written in English. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Then, within the space of two catastrophic years, nearly all of them were dead. The Brontë story would strain belief as fiction; as fact, it has drawn pilgrims across the Atlantic for more than 150 years. As guides who regularly take American guests into Brontë Country, here is the family's true story – the essential background to any visit.

An Irish father and a Cornish mother

The family begins with an extraordinary act of self-invention. Patrick Brontë was born Patrick Brunty in 1777, in a two-room cabin in County Down, Ireland, one of ten children of a farm labourer. By brains and ferocious determination he talked his way to Cambridge University, was ordained a Church of England clergyman, and somewhere along the way polished his surname into the more distinguished "Brontë". In 1812 he married Maria Branwell, a gentle, intelligent woman from a merchant family in Penzance, Cornwall. Six children followed in eight years: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte (born 21 April 1816), the only boy Patrick Branwell (1817), Emily Jane (30 July 1818) and Anne (17 January 1820).

In 1820 the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, a hilltop weaving township above the moors of West Yorkshire, where Patrick had been appointed perpetual curate. Within eighteen months his wife was dead of cancer, leaving him with six children under eight. Her sister, Aunt Elizabeth Branwell, came up from Cornwall to run the household – and stayed for the rest of her life.

Tragedy at school: the shadow of Lowood

In 1824 Patrick sent his four eldest daughters to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, an institution for the children of poor clergy whose harsh regime and poor food became notorious. Within a year, tuberculosis swept through the school; Maria and Elizabeth were sent home to die, aged eleven and ten. Charlotte, who never forgot watching her brilliant eldest sister fade, took her revenge two decades later: Cowan Bridge became the pitiless Lowood School of Jane Eyre, and saintly, dying Helen Burns is her portrait of Maria. The surviving children – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne – were educated largely at home thereafter, with the run of their father's books and newspapers.

The secret worlds of the parsonage

What happened next is one of the great incubations in literary history. In June 1826 Patrick brought Branwell a box of twelve toy soldiers; the four children seized on them, named them, and began inventing stories – which grew into entire imaginary kingdoms. Charlotte and Branwell built the empire of Angria; Emily and Anne broke away to create Gondal, a windswept island realm they sustained into adulthood. The children wrote their sagas in home-made miniature books, some smaller than a matchbox, in script so tiny it needs a magnifying glass – partly to match the soldiers' scale, partly to keep adult eyes out. Dozens survive, treasured today at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and in collections such as New York's Morgan Library. Decades of this apprenticeship – plotting, world-building, writing daily – is a large part of the answer to the perennial question: how did three isolated young women write like that?

Governesses, Brussels and thwarted hopes

Money was always short, and the sisters faced the standard fate of educated, portionless Victorian women: teaching. All three served unhappy spells as teachers or governesses – experiences that fed directly into Jane Eyre and Anne's Agnes Grey. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to improve their French at the Pensionnat Heger, where Charlotte fell painfully in love with her married teacher, Constantin Heger – an unrequited passion that later smouldered through her novels Villette and The Professor. A plan to open their own school at the parsonage attracted precisely zero pupils.

1846–1848: the miracle years

The turning point came by accident, in autumn 1845, when Charlotte found a notebook of Emily's private poems and recognised them – correctly – as works of genius. Over Emily's fury, she engineered a joint publication: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), issued under androgynous pseudonyms to dodge the prejudice against women writers. It sold two copies. Undeterred, each sister finished a novel. In October 1847 Charlotte's Jane Eyre appeared and became an overnight sensation; that December, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey followed. In 1848 Anne published a second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whose unflinching portrait of an abusive marriage was so controversial it still reads as radical. London buzzed with theories about the mysterious "Bell brothers"; in July 1848 Charlotte and Anne travelled to the capital to prove to Charlotte's astonished publisher that the Bells were, in fact, two small parson's daughters from Yorkshire.

The terrible years

Then the family's luck, never good, collapsed entirely. Branwell – the adored only son, whose talents had dissolved into alcohol, opium and debt after a disastrous affair – died in September 1848, aged 31. At his funeral Emily caught a chill; refusing all medical help until her final hours, she died of tuberculosis that December, aged 30, having seen Wuthering Heights meet mostly baffled, hostile reviews. Anne, gentler but no less resolute, fought her own tuberculosis until the following May, dying at Scarborough, the seaside town she loved, aged 29. In eight months Charlotte had buried all three siblings.

She endured, wrote Shirley and Villette, became a reluctant literary celebrity, and in 1854 found late happiness, marrying her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Nine months later, in March 1855, she died in early pregnancy, three weeks short of her 39th birthday. Old Patrick Brontë, who had outlived his wife and all six children, survived until 1861 – and it was he who authorised the biography by Charlotte's friend Elizabeth Gaskell that turned his daughters into legends.

Why they still matter – and where to meet them

The novels endure because they broke the rules: Jane Eyre gave fiction its first plain, poor, furiously self-respecting heroine; Wuthering Heights ignored every Victorian nicety to portray love as elemental force; Anne's books told truths about governessing and marriage that polite society preferred unsaid. And uniquely among great writers, the Brontës' world survives almost intact: the parsonage, the church, the moors, even the sofa on which Emily died. Our small-group Brontë tours travel from Windermere and Ambleside into the heart of Brontë Country with a maximum of six guests, bringing this astonishing family story to life in the very landscape that made it. Once you know the story, the moors are never just scenery again.

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.