Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy Read online

  AUNT BRANWELL

  AND THE

  BRONTË LEGACY

  AUNT BRANWELL

  AND THE

  BRONTË LEGACY

  Nick Holland

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  PEN AND SWORD HISTORY

  an imprint of

  Pen and Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire S70 2AS

  Copyright © Nick Holland, 2018

  ISBN 978 1 52672 223 2

  esISBN 97 8 15267 2224 9

  Mobi ISBN 97 8 15267 2225 6

  The right of Nick Holland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Chapter 1 The Region of Enchantment

  Chapter 2 A Man of Enterprising Spirit

  Chapter 3 Fairly Spread Thy Early Sail

  Chapter 4 Blooming and Young and Fair

  Chapter 5 Music, Dancing, and Society

  Chapter 6 By Sight and Report

  Chapter 7 Weary Wandering

  Chapter 8 Heart-rending Cries

  Chapter 9 This May Be Her Home as Long as She Lives

  Chapter 10 Curiosity and a Quick Intellect

  Chapter 11 My Kind, Prim Aunt

  Chapter 12 Their Darling Truant

  Chapter 13 To Begin a School

  Chapter 14 Rest at Last

  Chapter 15 Last Days

  Chapter 16 Connections in the South

  Chapter 17 Going on a Voyage

  Chapter 18 A Mother’s Care

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people I need to thank for their invaluable support and encouragement during the writing and publishing of this book, not least my family and friends. I also wish to thank the readers of my blog, www.annebronte.org, and of my previous books for their continued support and kind comments.

  I have found Pen and Sword Books a pleasure to work with, so great thanks go to all the team there in my home town of Barnsley, and I look forward to working with you all again. Thank you for helping to bring the story of Elizabeth Branwell to life.

  Thanks, as always, to everyone at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, from Ann Dinsdale and Sarah Laycock who do such important work expanding and managing the collection, to Danielle Cadamarteri and her team at the museum shop, and indeed to all the amazing volunteers who give up their time because of their love of the Brontës.

  Thank you to Victoria Reece-Romain and the team behind the Q Fund, who in the name of Cornish writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch have helped me and many others write books about the wonderful county of Cornwall, and the people from it. Thanks also to Rachel Viney and all at the Penzance Literary Festival, and to Melissa Hardie-Budden and the Hypatia Trust, experts on the Branwell and Carne families.

  Thank you to Janet Brown for the use of her photograph of the Brontë Parsonage, and to the National Portrait Gallery, and also to Sarah Mason Walden of Nashville, Tennessee, a Brontë expert, enthusiast and collector. Thank you also to expert handwriting analyst Jean Elliott, genealogist Ian Argall, the British Library, the National Archives and the Brotherton Library.

  Finally, thank you for reading my book. I hope you enjoy it.

  Preface

  Three sisters, born in a crowded, somewhat dilapidated, mid-terraced building in Thornton between 1816 and 1820, went on to become the most famous writing family in the world. They were Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, and would become synonymous with the village their father moved to just four months after the birth of Anne, his sixth and final child; Haworth.

  As a Yorkshireman myself, I’m very proud to be from the same county that produced, against all odds, such genius. The creators of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, among other works, are to my mind the queens of Yorkshire – and yet their roots and influences lay far away from the Pennine moorlands they called home.

  Many people know that their father, Patrick Brontë, was an Anglican priest originally from County Down in what is now Northern Ireland, and indeed that his name wasn’t Brontë at all originally, as he changed it from the all too obviously Irish Brunty or Prunty. Many people also know of the sad early demise of the Brontës’ mother, Maria, who died when her youngest child Anne was just one year old. Originally from Penzance, Cornwall, her tragic death in 1821 denied the young Brontës a mother, and explains why they were influenced by Ireland but not Cornwall. This is well known, but like many well-known things, it is in fact wrong.

  Maria Bronte’s death was indeed a terrible tragedy for her husband and children, but they were not denied a mother figure as they grew up as that role was taken on admirably and courageously by her eldest sister, Elizabeth Branwell. Originally arriving in Haworth in the summer of 1821 to nurse her sick sister, Elizabeth remained to help raise her nephew and nieces in the way that she felt their mother would have wanted.

  This action is a true measure of the woman who gave up the pleasant life she had known in the warmth of south-west England for a new home 400 miles away – a home in a harsh environment and in a village where sickness and death was endemic, where the accents and customs were foreign to her, and where the cold, wuthering winds seemed to blow ceaselessly. It was a substantial sacrifice, and, once made, it became a permanent one – she remained in Haworth for more than two decades until her death, never seeing the familiar Cornish seascapes again.

  The writing of the Brontë sisters has been a part of my life since I first picked up Wuthering Heights as an 18-year-old student, and like many other people across the world I’ve found their life stories just as fascinating as the masterpieces of fiction they crafted. As a Brontë biographer I became particularly interested in the common perception of Elizabeth Branwell, or Aunt Branwell as she became known to her charges. Thanks largely to Elizabeth Gaskell’s early, and brilliant, biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, it is easy to get the impression that Aunt Branwell was stern, resentful, unloving almost. This interpretation, however, is one completely at odds with Branwell Brontë’s lament that his aunt was ‘the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood.’1

  My aim in writing this, the first ever biography of Elizabeth Branwell, is to create a more faithful impression of the woman who became such an influence on the Brontë sisters and their brother. She was not only their childhood guide, she it was who shaped their characters and personalities, supported their education, and encouraged their creativity. As we shall see, without one very specific input tha
t she had in their lives, there would have been no Brontë books.

  We will also look at the Branwell family of Penzance as a whole, and see how their story often mirrored that of the Brontës of Yorkshire. In examining this less than familiar branch of the family, we’ll discover how another Brontë aunt left England to start a new life in a new continent – and how her descendants are now the only surviving members of the Branwell line. Now living in a location far removed from Penzance, and from Haworth, they are the closest living relatives of the Brontë sisters in the world.

  Writing this book has not been easy, but it has been hugely rewarding. Elizabeth Branwell left behind no letters or writings of her own, but by looking at pronouncements upon her by the Brontës, including veiled appearances in Brontë novels, and others who knew her well, we can get a fuller picture of this woman who became so central to the lives of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne. It is time to take a fresh look at Elizabeth Branwell, and acknowledge both her qualities as a woman, and her pivotal role in the Brontë legacy that we all enjoy today. To find the real Aunt Branwell, we must begin our journey by travelling to the Cornish peninsula in the eighteenth century.

  Chapter 1

  The Region of Enchantment

  ‘The island was fifty miles in circumference and certainly it appeared more like the region of enchantment or a beautiful fiction than sober reality … from a beautiful grove of winter roses and twining woodbine, towers a magnificent palace of pure white marble whose elegant and finely wrought pillars seem the work of mighty Genii and not of feeble men.’

  Charlotte Brontë, Tales of the Islanders

  The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is a magical building that continues to attract tourists from across the globe, literary pilgrims who share the dream of getting closer to the everyday lives of the genius siblings Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Among the treasures on show, the clothing worn by the Brontës is a particular draw to many, and standing in front of the dress that Charlotte Brontë wore to her wedding in 1854, for example, can bring an awed silence to the most vocal visitor.

  For me, however, it is a smaller, less obtrusive, item of clothing that holds a particular fascination. With so many treasures in their collection, the staff at the museum rotate their exhibits regularly, but one item often features within a glass-topped cabinet in the room now billed as ‘Charlotte’s Room’. Easily passed over, they are a pair of pattens that were worn frequently by a woman central to the Brontë story, but about whom most people know very little; Elizabeth Branwell.

  Pattens are wood- or metal-soled overshoes that are attached to the everyday footwear. In the first half of the nineteenth century, they were typically added to shoes when walking outdoors to protect the footwear from mud and water and to give added grip. Elizabeth Branwell, however, wore her pattens indoors, as reported to Charlotte Brontë’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell:

  ‘I have heard that Miss Branwell always went about the house in pattens, clicking up and down the stairs, from her dread of catching cold.’1

  This sentence encapsulates what makes these otherwise unassuming items so important to me; they are a perfect embodiment of the sacrifice that Elizabeth Branwell made. We shall read later how and why Elizabeth travelled from Penzance to Haworth in 1821, but we should not underestimate the huge sacrifice she was making. One of the greatest hardships she bore was the vast difference in climate between the invariably temperate Cornwall and the frequently wild Yorkshire, but rather than return to the weather, and the town, she loved, Elizabeth instead wore her pattens inside and out, and did her best to ignore the cold winds stealing underneath the doorways and through the floorboards. There can be little doubt that if she had not chosen to stay, pattens and all, we would not have the remarkable Brontë novels that are so loved today.

  There was certainly a great difference in weather and temperature between Haworth and Penzance, and it’s easy to think that everything must have seemed alien to Elizabeth Branwell after her arrival at the parsonage building that would become her final home, but in fact she found certain similarities between the two locations, in spite of the 400 miles separating them.

  Other than the Brontë Parsonage itself there is one other attraction that visitors to Haworth long to see – the moors. At the summit of the village they stretch away from the parsonage building on three sides, and became known and loved by all the Brontë children. Stern and bleak in winter they are transformed by a crown of purple heather in late summer, and yet whatever the season they were a source of magic and enchantment to the Brontës, and to Emily and Anne in particular.

  Walking across the Pennine moors around Haworth can bring a sense of wonderment as we realise that we’re walking the paths trodden by the feet of the Brontës two centuries earlier. Some locations are particularly evocative, such as the ramshackle ruin of Top Withens, the location if not the actual building portrayed in Wuthering Heights, and the Brontë falls with its nearby rock, the Brontë seat, where the sisters sat and discussed life, nature and their childhood tales.

  Another such location is Ponden Kirk, a megalithic tower of gritstone rock that rises as a cliff from the moors around three miles to the west of Haworth Parsonage. This outcrag is an imposing feature in itself but what particularly draws the eye is the tall slender hole in the middle of its lower portion. This opening is just large enough for children or young adults to crawl through. Myths have surrounded this strange natural phenomenon for centuries, but by the time of the Brontës it had become known as the fairy cave. It was commonly known, if maybe only half-believed, that passing through this hole brought good fortune to newly married couples, but that unmarried couples who crawled through together would die within a year if they did not marry each other; if they married someone else they were doomed to commit suicide and their spirit would thereafter haunt the cave forevermore2.

  Ponden Kirk was a feature much loved by Emily Brontë, and the area is recreated under the guise of Penistone Crag in Wuthering Heights, in which the fairy cave is referenced on three occasions, including Catherine’s death-bed recollection of it to Nelly:

  ‘This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending, while I am near, that they are only locks of wool. That’s what you’ll come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I’m not wandering, you’re mistaken, or I should believe you really were that withered hag, and I should think I was under Penistone Crag3.’

  Catherine’s end is nearly upon her, but doubtless she is thinking of happier times in her childhood; she crawled through the fairy cave entrance with Heathcliff but did not marry him, and now, as the legend prophecies, she has to die. It is clear that Emily was conversant with this folkore, and local mythology runs like a rich vein throughout her novel – half remembrances of stories told to her by the much-loved elderly servant Tabby Aykroyd but also, as we shall see, stories told to her by her Aunt Branwell.

  When walking near Ponden Kirk today, particularly in mist or when dark clouds gather overhead, it is easy to picture two girls walking ahead of us, hand in hand as they so frequently were – it is Anne and Emily, walking through the rectangular hole in Penistone Kirk. But wait, the mist clears and we see what appears to be the same moorland landscape and two girls, hand in hand approach a hole in the rock and crawl through it, but now the ancient rock and the hole within it are circular. We are seeing an earlier generation of children – this is Maria and Elizabeth Branwell at the Men-an-Tol, a mysterious stone structure left behind by an unknown civilisation that stands three miles west of Penzance. The stone is said to have healing powers, and so for centuries, children with rickets were passed, unclothed, through it nine times as a cure – nine being the number of magic4. Another legend says that if a woman crawls through Men-an-Tol backwards under the light of a full moon she will soon become pregnant.

  The moorland landscape stretching around Men-an-Tol and around Ponden Kirk shares the same bleak beauty, belyin
g the hundreds of miles that lie between them. The moors of Haworth must have seemed strangely familiar to Elizabeth Branwell when she first arrived there, and it was some comfort to her to discover that the landscape of this westernmost outpost of Yorkshire had a great deal in common with the landscape she knew so well from West Penwith, the westernmost outpost of Cornwall and of the island of Britain as a whole.

  There is one other element that the areas around Haworth and Penzance share; they are both lands filled with ancient legends, lands where the supernatural has coincided alongside the everyday for century after century, lands that are a perfect breeding ground for storytellers. One example, the Cornish piskie, has become an emblem of Elizabeth’s home county, much loved by tourists and gift shops, but at the turn of the nineteenth century many people really believed in the existence of these little folk, and attributed to them all manner of ills, from poor crops to sick livestock. It was even said they would sometimes swap a human child for one of their own, leaving behind a changeling who was sure to wreak havoc in the family who raised them.

  As the nineteenth century wore on, piskie apparitions became increasingly rare in local folklore as the chronicler Samuel Drew noted in 1824:

  ‘The age of piskays, like that of chivalry, is gone. There is, perhaps, at present hardly a house they are reputed to visit. They neither steal children, nor displace domestic articles. Even the fields and lanes which they formerly frequented seem to be nearly forsaken. Their music is rarely heard; and they appear to have forgotten to attend their ancient midnight dance. The diffusion of knowledge, by which the people have been enlightened during the last half century, has considerably reduced the numbers of piskays; and even the few that remain, are evidently preparing to take their departure5.’