Journal

father, despite his more orthodox beliefs. The Revd Patrick Brontë was
basically what we might now call a liberal evangelical, firmly rooted in the
Church of England, a man of integrity, social conscience and a strongly held
Christian faith. 5 It was this faith that Charlotte Brontë clung to—often by only
a slender thread—throughout the trials and tribulations of her life.
Her first trial came with the death of her mother when she was only five
years old. Her mother’s sister, the unmarried Elizabeth Branwell from
Cornwall, came to live with the family and took over the practical and
religious management of the Brontë household. Early biographers often
accuse the Aunt of instilling in her nephew and nieces a fear of Calvinist
predestination, which most of them struggled with in their teenage years and
which is satirised in their later novels; but critics now believe that these
Calvinist beliefs were probably the result of the evangelical teachings of
people like the Revd Carus Wilson at the Anglican Clergy Daughters’ school
at Cowan Bridge, the first school Charlotte attended and the model for the
notorious Lowood school in Jane Eyre.
A present-day image of Cowan School, attended by Maria, Elizabeth, Anne,
Emily and Charlotte.
Wilson regarded the school as a ‘nursery for heaven’ and although he was not
intentionally cruel, many pupils fell ill because of his strict regime and so-
- 18 -