In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

  Branwell was oblivious to the danger, but then he always was oblivious to danger, living in the moment and caring nothing for tomorrow. Anne, however, felt the danger sharply, and she felt shame too. Her brother’s conduct had compromised her and turned her into a sinner along with him. Could she keep silent or even deny the truth if questioned, or should she do the right thing and in doing so betray her own brother? Would she be Peter or Cain?

  Anne was not the only one who had noticed what was happening. The maid Anne Marshall, with whom Anne Brontë was on friendly terms, revealed that she had seen Branwell and his mistress in a more than compromising position.3 By November 1843 he was writing to his friend in Haworth, John Brown, confessing that Miss Marshall ‘saw him do enough to hang him’.4 He also revealed the full extent of his relationship with Mrs Robinson. He first says that she, his ‘little lady’, is growing thinner by the day, but that she has the courage to bear anything except parting from him. With the letter he sends a lock of Mrs Robinson’s hair that had lain on his chest that morning, but he laments that they could not lay with each other legally as husband and wife.

  Here was the true dreadful situation that Anne had to face. The brother she had brought to Thorp Green in an effort to redeem his soul was now sleeping with her employer, and everybody seemed to know it except Mr Robinson himself. She remonstrated with her brother in private, but he mocked her and told her to keep quiet unless she wanted to be the cause of his ruin.

  As the years 1843 and 1844 passed the affair continued, and now Branwell was becoming more confidant, careless and brazen. He would argue openly with Mr Robinson, who would complain that he was neglecting his duties with his son, and that he was drinking too much at the dinner table. On these occasions, Mrs Robinson would defend Branwell, and Anne would cast her eyes down, praying silently but fervently for the moment she could return to the solace of her room.

  In January 1844, Charlotte returned to Haworth from Brussels. Anne’s mind now turned to thoughts of escape. If the school plan could finally be put into place, she could leave Thorp Green and its scandalous scenes behind, yet Charlotte was too pre-occupied with thoughts of Monsieur Heger to do anything about their school. Charlotte was blissfully unaware of the situation that her sister and brother were in, and on 23 January 1844 she wrote to Ellen and reported that Anne and Branwell were thriving in their positions and were ‘wondrously valued’.5

  At the urging of Anne, who still had an ally in Emily, Charlotte at last put plans into motion. They would set up a small and exclusive school in the Haworth Parsonage itself. All three sisters had experience in teaching at the Haworth Sunday School, founded by their father and next door to the parsonage, to call upon and that may help to enhance their reputation in the area and attract pupils. One of the Sunday school pupils was later to recall that out of all the sisters who taught him, Anne ‘looked the nicest and most serious like’.6

  Modifications would be needed to the parsonage, but their first step would be to attract some initial pupils. This proved much harder than expected. They had cards printed that were entitled ‘The Misses Brontës’ Establishment for the Board and Education of a Limited Number of Young Ladies’.7 These cards were sent to parents of potential pupils across the West Riding and listed the lessons they would give. For £35 per year pupils would be taught writing, arithmetic, history, grammar, geography and needlework. Optional lessons in French, German, Music, Drawing and Latin (which perforce would have to be taught by Anne), would cost an extra guinea each per term.

  Anne’s hopes were momentarily raised. At last there was some concrete form to their plans, if they could just find one or two pupils she could return to Haworth and commence what she dreamed of as her life’s work, but to her dismay not one pupil was found. The attainments of the teachers were undoubtedly high, but so too was the cost. The remoteness of Haworth also proved problematic, with parents also unwilling to send their children to board in a village that had a reputation for illness and disease.

  There was one other problem facing the sisters’ school plan, and that was Branwell himself. After Anne and Branwell returned to Haworth from Scarborough in the summer of 1844, it was the first time that all four Brontë children had been united again since the first days of 1842. Emily and Charlotte could not help but notice the change in their brother. His actions were becoming more unpredictable. One day he could be his old self, happy and full of life and hope, but the next he would be despondent and angry. On these days he would seek out his old drinking companions or spend the day in the Black Bull on his own before returning to the parsonage and railing against the injustice of the world.

  It was clear that their plans for a school had reached an impasse. Nobody wanted to send their children to Haworth, and even if they did, could they rely on Branwell to behave respectably if he too was in residence? The sisters clung to their dream a little longer, but by November of 1844, when they had still to receive a single positive response, it was abandoned forever. For Anne this was a time of deep, dark despair, but within a year their situations would have changed again, and a new plan was born.

  It was not just the ongoing affair between her brother and her employer that was grieving Anne but the way in which Mrs Robinson treated her children, the daughters Anne was increasingly fond of. Lydia and Bessie were reaching the ages where they would have to think about their future; for their mother that simply meant finding a wealthy and well-connected husband, and Anne despaired to find that although the children were not happy with that arrangement, they were nevertheless resigned to their fate.

  Anne believed, unusually for her time, that marriage between man and woman was a contract between equals, and the only basis for marriage was a mutual love. The Robinson children, however, were taught that the sole function of marriage was to cement or improve one’s position in society and that love was something to be avoided, even scorned.

  In Agnes Grey, Anne talks about the unsuitable marriage that the mother of Rosalie, based upon young Lydia, is trying to foist upon her: ‘I was amazed and horrified at Mrs Murray’s heartlessness, or want of thought for the real good of her child; and, by my unheeded warnings and exhortations, I vainly strove to remedy the evil.’8

  It is a strong word that Anne uses, and yet she really did think this was an evil act. The formalised courting that the girls were subjected to and the balls held in Thorp Green Hall with the sole purpose of finding suitably wealthy matches were, in Anne’s eyes, contrary to the gift of love that came from God himself. She questioned the girls about their beliefs, and she tried to encourage them to find a match who they truly cared for, but at this point her entreaties met with little success. We can hear the echo of her pupil’s words in those spoken by Rosalie: ‘To think that I could be such a fool as to fall in love! It is quite beneath the dignity of a woman to do such a thing. Love! I detest the word! As applied to one of our sex, I think it a perfect insult.’9

  Each day now seemed a mockery to Anne, with everyone in the hall behaving in what seemed to her a shameful manner. Branwell was sleeping with Mrs Robinson. The Misses Robinson were throwing away their chances of true happiness in the pursuit of material gain. Even Mr Robinson was becoming increasingly choleric as he attempted to avoid the truth that was flaunted under his nose, and he was drinking heavily as a coping mechanism.

  Branwell was becoming more and more besotted with Mrs Robinson, and at the same time less concerned who knew about it. He knew, from his lover, that males in the Robinson line often died young, and Edmund Robinson’s red face and increasingly vile temper gave him hope that his employer would not be long for this world. Branwell also harboured the belief that if Mrs Robinson were forced to choose between her ranting husband and her young lover, she would choose Branwell.

  The more Anne tried to reason with her brother, the more he resisted. She was a fool, like she had always been. What did she know about love, about life? Once more she felt the cold shadows creeping into her soul, as she had done at Ro
e Head. She felt that every day longer she remained at Thorp Green she would be subjected to even greater indignities, and she could not take much more. As the school scheme had been abandoned, so too it was time to admit defeat in this venture.

  In June she approached her master and mistress again, and explained that this time she really must resign her position. Lydia and Bessie were now young adults; the job she had been employed to perform had reached its natural end. This time she met with no opposition: Mrs Robinson would be glad to be rid of another witness, and she understood Anne’s character well enough to know that her silence could be relied upon.

  As the carriage waited to carry Anne back to Haworth, the children who had been in her care embraced her, with tears running down their cheeks. They had grown to love the governess that they had at first found strange and severe, and it was a love that would not be broken by their parting. For the rest of her life, Anne would receive letters from the Robinson children, seeking advice and help from her that they could not gain from their mother. Although she could not have known it at the time, she had not been unsuccessful in reforming and moulding their characters.

  Both Bessie and Mary did marry wealthy husbands, although they had complained bitterly to Anne about the fates awaiting them, as Charlotte reveals in a letter to Ellen of 28 July 1848:

  Anne continues to hear constantly – almost daily, from her old pupils, the Robinsons. They are both now engaged to different gentlemen and if they do not change their minds, which they have already done two or three times, will probably be married in a few months. Not one spark of love does either of them profess for her future husband … Anne does her best to cheer and counsel her [Bessie Robinson] and she seems to cling to her quiet, former governess as her only true friend.10

  Following Anne’s guidance, Bessie Robinson broke off her engagement to a Mr Milner, although the case went to court and her mother had to pay over £90 in compensation. She was eventually to marry industrialist William Jessop of Butterley Hall, Ripley, in Derbyshire. As an adult she would follow Anne’s example and demonstrate great kindness and compassion with the people around her. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 29 December 1881 reports on her ‘annual treat to the poor of Ripley’, where she and her husband invited over 200 people to tea and gave each a shilling.11

  When they entered the room they were cheered by all present. On 17 January 1882 the Sheffield Independent reports the sad news of Bessie’s death, saying the poor people of Ripley had lost a true friend. During her funeral the shops of the village closed and a Union Jack flew at half mast over the Butterley ironworks. If she could have known it, Anne would have been proud of the influence she had on her former pupil.

  Anne cast one last look back at the grand hall she was leaving behind. The children were still waving, but Branwell stood arrogant and immobile in the doorway. Rotten interiors could lie behind grand façades; she was glad to be rid of the place once and for all. Her diary paper of July 1845, the last she would ever write, was very revealing when looking back at the paper of four years prior:

  I was then at Thorp Green, and now I am only just escaped from it. I was wishing to leave it then, and if I had known that I had four years longer to stay how wretched I should have been; but during my stay I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experiences of human nature.12

  Anne arrived back at Haworth after more than five years at Thorp Green Hall, by far the longest period of time that any of the Brontë children kept a job. She had been highly valued by her employer, and she had shown that despite her underlying shyness, she was strong enough to make her own way in the world. However, in the end she was not prepared to sacrifice the values she held so dear.

  Emily was delighted to see her younger sister again, but she noted how Anne looked frail and tired. She suggested that they go away together, and Anne proposed that they visit Scarborough, the beloved town that she would never more visit in company with the Robinsons. The plans were made: they would first spend a few days in York before moving on to Scarborough. It was to be the first ‘long journey’ they had ever taken together, and Emily was enormously excited. On the train journey to York, Emily suggested to Anne that they act out the parts of their Gondal characters. To her it was as if the intervening years had never happened: they were the closely bound sisters again, happiest when alone and yet together in their fantasy world.

  Emily describes the adventure gleefully in her 1845 diary paper:

  Anne and I went on our first long journey by ourselves together, leaving home on the 30th of June, Monday sleeping at York, returning to Keighley Tuesday evening, sleeping there and walking home on Wednesday morning. Though the weather was broken we enjoyed ourselves very much … and during our excursion we were Ronald Macelgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabelle, Ella and Julian Egramont, Catherine Navarre and Cordelia Fitzaphnold escaping from the palaces of Instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.13

  Anne was delighted to see her sister so happy but could do little to raise her own spirits. Whilst she had been away Emily had regressed further into her childhood world until fantasy and reality were indistinguishable, but Anne had seen too much of the real aristocracy to be concerned with a fake nobility. She had escaped from a real palace of instruction, but her escape had taken all her strength from her.

  The planned onward journey to Scarborough was cancelled. Anne was too weak and tired to make the journey, so Emily had to be content with a look around York Minster and the cobbled chaos of The Shambles before journeying home again. The walk home from Keighley would also have brought back memories for Anne, memories of an evening in 1840 when William Weightman had walked her home after taking the sisters to see him give a speech at the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute. He was now a ghost that would forever walk this route, waiting to be joined; it was a memory that was strengthening, not diminishing.

  Anne had still not told her family the truth about Branwell and her parting from Thorp Green, but just a month after her return she was spared the trouble. Branwell himself returned: he had been dismissed from his post in disgrace. He opened up his heart to his sisters, saying that Mr Robinson had discovered his relationship with Mrs Robinson; after a torrid scene, he had sent him packing, threatening that his very life would be in danger if he showed his face again.

  Branwell’s sisters rallied round him. Charlotte immediately blamed the wicked Lydia for leading on her tutor and using him for her own pleasure before casting him to one side, but Branwell would not hear a word said against her. It was true love, he insisted, becoming louder and more agitated with every sentence, and it was only a matter of time before she would divorce Edmund so that she and Branwell could be together lawfully at last. Anne kept her eyes fixed on the floor, her brother was consumed by fantasies of his own making, and she realised that he could never be free of them.

  Branwell sought solace in drink more than ever before, and in laudanum as well. He would often become drunk to the point of insensibility, and at these times the sisters would refer to him euphemistically as being ‘unwell’. Branwell had embarked upon a change from which he would never return, and in their own way his sisters were about to do the same.

  Anne and Emily had resumed their youthful routine of writing Gondal poetry together, although for Anne it was more of a way to kill time and keep unwanted memories at bay than a labour of love. Emily wrote these poems down in a book, but one morning in September 1845 Charlotte discovered something else altogether. It was a book that she had not seen before, and when she opened it her breath was taken away. There before her, in Emily’s handwriting, were poems that she had not known existed. They weren’t about Gondal, they were about the very fabric of life and death, about love and loneliness, faith and despair. Charlotte describes this moment that changed literary history in her 1850 ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’:

  One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a manuscript v
olume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me, – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they also had a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.14

  Charlotte had discovered the secret that Emily had even kept from Anne. She had a second book of verse, and one that nobody else but her could ever see. These verses were the very heart and soul of Emily, this intensely private woman, so how did Charlotte ‘accidentally’ light upon them? Could it be that she had caught a glimpse one day of Emily hiding something away and had waited for the moment when she could uncover it?

  The secret was out in the open, and Charlotte would not allow it to return to the dark. She confronted Emily, with the intention of asking her to send them to a publisher, but Emily’s reaction was even worse than she had anticipated. She screamed and smashed crockery on to the floor, and had to be held back from physically confronting her sister. Charlotte locked herself away in the safety of her own room while Emily continued to rave almost incoherently. She had been betrayed by her own sister; in her mind she had been exposed, made a mockery of.

  The initial rage subsided to be replaced by a grim silence. Charlotte, never easily deterred from doing what she thought was right, tried again to convince Emily that the poems had to be published. They were just too good to be kept to herself, but Emily remained resolute and angry. It was time for Anne to take sides, and for once she chose Charlotte over Emily. Once more, Charlotte described the scene in her ‘biographical notice’: