Anne Brontë

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Standard Name: Brontë, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Brontë
Pseudonym: Acton Bell
Used Form: Anne Bronte
The youngest of the famous Brontë sisters, AB has had the slightest reputation among the three for her output of poetry and two novels. Recently, however, her fiction's importance and influence has begun to be recognized, particularly for its incisive and detailed portrayal of the oppression of middle-class Victorian women.
Detail from the long lost, now well-known, painting of Anne Brontë and her sisters by their brother Branwell, c. 1834. She is shown from the shoulders up, at a three-quarter turn, wearing a blue dress. Her loose blonde curls fall around her face. The picture retains the crease marks from its years folded on top of a wardrobe. National Portrait Gallery

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Charlotte Brontë
Anne and CB apparently experienced crises of faith around this time; Anne was also seriously ill.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
280-1, 284-5
death John Oliver Hobbes
She had left her parents' home on the Isle of Wight the day before, having spent three energetic days there, and her father later wrote that on leaving she gave no indication of illness or...
Education Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP ) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Education Mary Gawthorpe
Apprenticeship included some part-time attendance at the Pupil-Teacher Centre in the LeedsSchool Board offices. There MG continued with largely the same subjects as at school, with the addition of French, educational theory, psychology, and...
Education Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
Education H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric . Eric also provided his sister...
Education F. Tennyson Jesse
Though FTJ did not receive much formal education, she read voraciously. Important discoveries were theBrontësisters , Jane Austen , and Constance Garnett 's translations of Tolstoy .
Colenbrander, Joanna. A Portrait of Fryn. A. Deutsch, 1984.
33
Education Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM 's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Education Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters , Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein . Isak Dinesen was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1975.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
808
Education L. M. Montgomery
LMM attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Family and Intimate relationships Margaret Drabble
MD 's father, barrister John Frederick Drabble , also attended Cambridge , and served in the RAF during the second world war. In 1945, newly demobbed, he stood as Labour candidate for the Tory seat...
Family and Intimate relationships Emily Brontë
Two of EB 's sisters, Maria and Elizabeth , died before she reached the age of seven. With Charlotte , her elder by two years, and Anne , her younger by eighteen months, Emily engaged...
Family and Intimate relationships Emma Frances Brooke
It appears that EFB had at least two sisters, and that they may have both been writers. An article written after EFB revealed her authorship of A Superfluous Woman quotes her still undiscovered biographer: There...
Family and Intimate relationships Dora Sigerson
She had met him through Katharine Tynan, and they became engaged in September 1895 after a long courtship. Their loving marriage lasted the rest of Dora's life. They never had children.
Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. Smith, Elder, 1913.
240
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Shorter worked for...
Family and Intimate relationships Dora Carrington
Their friendship was at first somewhat shaky, but warmed considerably. Writing in her diary on 6 June 1918, Woolf described DC as such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same...

Timeline

1840
Thomas Cautley Newby established himself as a publisher in London; he earned notoriety for failing to honour contracts, especially with new writers.
10 September 2003
Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.

Texts

Brontë, Anne, and Emily Brontë. Agnes Grey. T. C. Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Charlotte, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë. Poems. Aylott and Jones, 1846.
Brontë, Anne, and Charles William Hatfield. The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë. Editor Shorter, Clement, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. T. C. Newby, 1848.
Brontë, Anne, and Winifred Gérin. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Editor Hargreaves, Geoffrey Duncan, Penguin, 1979.
Brontë, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Wuthering Heights. T. C. Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Emily, Anne Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë. Wuthering Heights; and, Agnes Grey. Smith, Elder, 1850.