Anne Brontë Biography

Anne Brontë (BRAHNT-ee) was the sixth and last child of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife, Maria Branwell. Not yet two years old when her mother died of cancer, Anne was raised by her Aunt Elizabeth, with whom she enjoyed a special relationship for twenty years. With her four sisters and brother, Branwell, Brontë grew up at Haworth parsonage on the harsh Yorkshire moors. The parsonage provided the Brontë children ample space to engage in a variety of fantasies. For more than twenty years Brontë and her older sister Emily wrote about the adventures of the inhabitants of Gondal, a fictitious romantic kingdom that shared the real-life landscape of the Brontës’ home and Yorkshire countryside.{$S[A]Bell, Acton;Brontë, Anne}

Brontë left home to attend school briefly in 1824-1825 but returned when her older sisters Maria and Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis there; they both died in 1825. A decade later, she attended Roe Head School, where her sister Charlotte was teaching; there she spent time consulting the Moravian minister James de la Trobe, who helped her formulate her ideas about religion and salvation.

Like her sister Emily, Anne wrote poetry regularly from the time she was a young adult, keeping her productions secret from the family. Most of her work has a decidedly religious note, but even in her earliest writings there are suggestions of romantic relationships inspired either by her reading or by her feelings for William...