This is Y December 2020 Digital Edition

This page: The Black
Bull at the top of
Haworth Main Street.
Anne Brontë portrait
by Branwell Brontë.
Opposite: The Brontë
Parsonage Museum.
Iam sitting in the Brontë Parsonage Museum
archives with a small painting of Anne Brontë
aged 16, drawn by her sister Charlotte. Anne is
wearing a string of simple glowing amber beads,
which had belonged to their mother; who had died
when Anne was not even a year old. Thanks to
the museum’s Lauren Livesey, I also have the real
beads in front of me. She has dug out a selection of
objects connected to “my favourite Brontë sister”.
I am still trying to process the impact of this
young motherless woman with her brown curls
and her few cherished possessions, on my life and on
the long campaign for women’s rights. I didn’t visit
the Parsonage or the landscape that Anne Brontë
roamed till long after she’d captured my imagination.
Her two novels are the works of a whistle-blower
confronting the truth of Victorian womanhood.
Agnes Grey recounts in documentary detail the grim
reality of her own experience as a poor governess to
wild children in a dysfunctional family.
Anne’s masterpiece The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is
a revolutionary novel recounting the degradations of
a woman trying to escape with her young son from a
marriage to a violent alcoholic. “Things that formerly
shocked and disgusted me, now seem only natural,”
her heroine Helen writes in her diary mourning her
entrapment. It may have drawn some of its detail
from observing the wretched decline of her brother
Branwell, but the novel was campaign literature for
all women. It challenged the right of men to own
their wives entirely. Anne’s writing astounded me.
It seemed to speak across the centuries.
For decades her reputation was damaged
and overshadowed by Charlotte’s negative
assessment of her work and character. But in the
20th century, Anne with her clear eyed passion for
justice and equality was reclaimed by feminists and
scholars. She seemed to be a modern woman in not
modern times.
Winning a place at Oxford in 1986, I chose to
study the new Women’s Studies option as part of
my English Literature degree. Alongside reading
the exciting new African American prose emerging
from the likes of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison,
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Property and
Possession: The Politics of Marriage in The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall, looking at connections with the
eventual 1870 Married Women’s Property Act that
finally granted women some rights – 22 years later.
After graduating I finally visited Haworth for the
first time with my sister, herself then a schoolteacher
in York. And most recently I’ve brought my own
daughter to this breathtaking landscape on the
spectacular moors for her to experience the ancient
wild beauty that inspired the sisters.
In Haworth Parsonage (became the Brontë
Parsonage Museum in 1928) I am mesmerised by
the tiny dim parlour where the girls walked round
the dining table sharing their stories of their
elaborately imagined early fantasy worlds. In the
archive I smile seeing Anne’s drawing of one of the
strong Amazonian women of her imaginary island
creation Gondal; standing tall and confident on the
rocky seashore, looking out to the horizon and a
world of adventure.
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yorkshire.com