The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family who lived in the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Their home, the parsonage, is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum and has become a huge visitor attraction for hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world.
The sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all achieved extraordinary fame from their novels and poems. They originally published their poems and novels under masculine pseudonyms, for reasons we, as women, are all too well aware of. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were later to be accepted as masterpieces of literature.
The three sisters and their brother, Branwell, were very close. The confrontation with the deaths first of their mother then of their two older sisters marked them profoundly and influenced their writing.
Branwell Brontë was the only male member of the Bronte family. Four of his five sisters were sent to Cowan Bridge boarding school and this started what was to be a sad cycle of deaths from TB.
His two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, both died from tuberculosis caught at the school. Branwell Brontë became an alcoholic and was thought to be addicted to laudanum, but his severe addictions masked the onset of tuberculosis, and his family did not realise that he was seriously ill until he collapsed outside the house and a local doctor identified him as being in the disease's terminal stages. He died shortly thereafter. Emily Brontë died of the disease in December of that year and Anne Brontë the following May.
A separate entry has been created for Emily, however, all the other members of the family are covered here.
Michel Legrand's song 'I was born in Love with you' from the film Wuthering heights, from the soundtrack, can be heard by following this LINK.
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