Charlotte Brontë blocked a reprint of her sister Anne's boldest novel
After Anne Brontë died at 29, her sister Charlotte decided which of her books lived on. She let Agnes Grey be reissued but stopped The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being republished, calling it a mistake. That choice dimmed Anne's reputation for years, though the novel now counts among the earliest feminist fiction.
Anne was the youngest of six children of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman born to poor Irish farmers who worked his way to Cambridge. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her two eldest sisters died when she was four, after a harsh boarding school where disease spread. Shaken, their father educated the surviving children at home in Haworth, where they roamed the moors and devoured his library, from Homer to Byron. Asked at four what a child most wanted, Anne reportedly answered age and experience.
Imagination filled the parsonage. In 1826 a set of toy soldiers given to their brother Branwell grew into Angria, an invented kingdom whose stories the children wrote in tiny hand-stitched books made from scraps of paper. Around age eleven, Anne and Emily, described by a family friend as being like twins, broke away from Charlotte and Branwell to invent their own world, Gondal, which occupied them into adulthood.
Work took her away. Being a governess was one of few respectable jobs open to her, and in 1839 she joined the wealthy Ingham family, whose spoiled children she called little dunces. Forbidden to punish them, and blamed when they misbehaved, she was dismissed after nine months, an experience that fed directly into Agnes Grey. She then spent five years with the Robinson family near York, where she eventually won her employers' affection and holidayed each summer in Scarborough, collecting stones and developing an interest in geology.
In 1846 the three sisters published a joint collection of poems under male-sounding pen names, Anne becoming Acton Bell. Agnes Grey appeared in 1847 in a set alongside Emily's Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall followed in 1848. She died on 28 May 1849, most likely of tuberculosis.
Source: Anne Brontë
