The tragic story behind Anne Brontë's final resting place
Why the youngest Brontë sister ended up buried miles apart from the rest of her family
Haworth is a small town in the north of England, famous for being home to the Brontë family in the 1800s. It is also the birthplace of Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s famous novels, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The town is a popular tourist attraction, and visitors come for romance, inspiration and nostalgia. There are cosy tea shops, beautiful bookstores and gift shops, quaint pubs and cobbled streets, and the parsonage itself (where the Brontës lived) is laid out as a museum in tribute to the family, each historical object so perfectly in place that as you walk through the rooms you can feel the ghostly presence of the siblings moving between hearth and table, window and piano.
I first visited Haworth twenty years ago, and I was entranced by the windswept, desolate moorland, coming away with a deep desire to write something epic and heart-wrenching. I was obsessed with the Brontës as a teen and by the time I visited Haworth I’d already read everything they’d written – their hefty biography by Juliet Barker has travelled from home to home with me for over thirty years now and still has pride of place on my bookshelf. However, when I returned earlier this year, on a rainy day in May, I found I wanted different insights this time, and at the heart of them all was just one question that intrigues me more and more as I get older: Where lies the truth of it all? Because it doesn’t take much digging to realise the daily lives of the Brontës were anything but easy or romantic.
The Haworth of the mid 1800s was not a nice place to live. As their father Patrick Brontë, curate for the district, went about his duties, ‘he often covered his mouth with a muffler as protection against the noxious smells and disease. Cholera was carried through the water supply. There were outbreaks of smallpox, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, typhus, dysentery and consumption.’ (1)
The youngest Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, grew up alongside death. Their mother died in 1821, leaving six children under the age of ten, and two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died after being sent away to school, at just ten and eleven years old. Charlotte and Emily were hastily brought home from the same school, and their father couldn’t bear to send them away again, choosing instead to educate them at home. His decision ensured that the sisters, along with their brother Bramwell, turned to one another’s imagination for entertainment. They developed entire, complex worlds together (many of these stories now lost), in epic, lasting adventures, well before turning their talents to writing the novels that would define them.
And yet, for the siblings, death would have always felt close. The front windows of the parsonage look out over the Haworth church graveyard, and many of the faded stones that we see today would have been brand new in the early-mid 1800s, continuously appearing as the siblings grew older. From the upstairs they could have watched the new graves being dug, and their father would have been constantly tending to dying parishioners. Over the years, the family were buried there too - one by one, moving from house to graveyard, so close and yet forever beyond reach of one another. It must have been torturous, and a stark contrast to the view at the other side of their house, where the moors landscape stretched away to the horizon, so vast and empty it would have felt as though they could follow it to eternity. No wonder that, in the Brontë’s’ stories, the moors represent freedom, wildness, and escape to other ways of being.
In the space of nine months, between 1848 and 1849, twenty years after the loss of their mother and sisters, a fresh round of tragedy struck the family. First, in September 1848, Bramwell died after a battle with addiction. By Christmas Emily had passed away too, struck down with consumption (the terminal stage of tuberculosis) and reluctant to take treatment until near the end of her life. Anne, who had a particularly close bond with Emily, started the New Year both stricken with grief and already unwell, with the same symptoms as Emily. In May 1849, as Anne’s condition worsened, she decided to travel to Scarborough with Charlotte in an attempt to improve her health. She planned to ‘take the waters’, a popular tradition of drinking the local spa waters, which were said to have healing qualities. (2)
Scarborough is 70 miles (110 kms) from Haworth, and the roads aren’t too kind even today, being narrow, hilly and winding. Back then, the journey on dirt roads, in a juddering carriage, would have been incredibly hard on a very poorly Anne. When they arrived in Scarborough, her health worsened. Thinking to spare Charlotte and her father further distress, Anne requested that she be buried locally and not returned to Haworth. She died two days after her arrival and her last words to her sister were, ‘Take courage, Charlotte. Take courage.’ (3) She was 29 years old.
It's incredible how much the Brontë sisters contributed to literary culture despite their early deaths (Emily aged 30; Charlotte aged 38). Perhaps in some less palatable ways the tragic quality of their lives has added to their allure. However, after Anne’s death, her reputation faded, not helped by Charlotte, who in 1850 refused to republish The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, saying, ‘Wildfell Hall hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer.’ (4)
Ouch! Thanks sis!
However, Charlotte did relent and republished in 1854, and Anne Brontë is now known as perhaps one of the first feminist writers, her style differing from her sisters – more realist than romantic – and her unflinching eye taking on subjects such as alcoholism, gender roles, marriage and motherhood. If she had lived longer, what else might she have offered to the world?
Anne herself expressed the frustration of her unrealised plans in a letter to Ellen Nussey while she was ill:
I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect ... But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa's and Charlotte's sakes but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God's will be done. (5)
How I would love to know more about her ‘schemes’, particularly in light of the following passage, in which Anne passionately defends the content of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, having received substantial criticism after its first publication:
My object in writing the following pages, was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it… When we have to deal with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience. (5)
And this, dear reader, is why Anne is my favourite Brontë of them all! I wish she could have known that her work would come to have such great and enduring effect on so many others. As it is, her final resting place lies seventy miles from the rest of her family, within the shadow of Scarborough castle, which also happens to be where Weston proposes to Agnes in Anne’s first novel Agnes Grey. Anne’s gravesite is perhaps a fitting symbol of the ways she stood slightly apart from her sisters within her work and perspective, but also of her loyalty and unselfish dying wish to love and protect her last living family members in whatever small ways she could.
I’m growing more and more intrigued by the lesser-known stories of great writers – I don’t see these as only tales of the past but as stories that carry great resonance and eternal themes for all of us to enjoy and contemplate. I also find it fascinating to ask where the truth of their lives intersects with opinion, myth and legend. As well as the Brontës, I’ve been looking at Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter and I’m keen to find others. Would you like to hear more of these? If so, let me know!
(2) Source: Taking The Waters: Anne Bronte In Scarborough – Anne Brontë
(3) Source: The Death and Funeral of Anne Brontë – Anne Brontë (annebronte.org)
(4) Source: Charlotte Bronte On The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë (annebronte.org)
(5) Source: Scarborough, England: Anne Brontë's Final Resting Place (literaryladiesguide.com)
General source: Barker, Juliette, The Brontës, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1994)
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I love this kind of thing, Sara! I'll be looking at the biography you mentioned.