Anne Brontë

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Anne Brontë, painted by her sister Charlotte

Anne Brontë [ ˈbrɒnti ] (born January 17, 1820 in Thornton ( Yorkshire ), † May 28, 1849 in Scarborough ) was a British writer . The younger sister of Charlotte , Branwell and Emily Brontë published her novels under the pen name Acton Bell .

Life

Anne was the youngest of the six children of Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), a clergyman in the Anglican Church , and his wife Maria (1783–1821). Two of their siblings died in childhood: Mary (1814-1825) and Elizabeth (1815-1825).

Brontë's grave in Scarborough. The inscription contains a mistake: Anne Brontë died at the age of 29.

She was baptized on May 25, 1820. After the mother's death on September 15, 1821, an aunt on her mother's side, Elizabeth Branwell, first looked after the children. From 1832 on, Charlotte Brontë dedicated herself to raising her younger sister. Because of her delicate health Anne was brought up and taught at home, only from October 1835 to December 1837 she attended a girls' school in Roe Head near Mirfield, where her sister Charlotte worked as a teacher.

From April 8, 1839 until the end of the same year, Anne worked as a governess for an Ingham family at Blake Hall, Mirfield. The experiences in her first job and the conditions there were incorporated into her first novel, Agnes Gray , as well as that of her second job with a Robinson family, where she worked from May 1840 to June 1845. Ultimately, a relationship between her brother Branwell, who also worked there from January 1843 as head of house for their son, with the woman of the house ended her stay.

Until her death she devoted herself to writing and drawing. After the death of her brother on September 24, 1848 and that of her sister Emily on December 19 of the same year, their health deteriorated noticeably. Even a trip to Scarborough in May 1849 could not stop the tuberculosis . Anne Brontë died there on May 28, 1849 and was buried in the cemetery of St. Mary on Castle Hill on May 30, 1849.

Literary work

The children of the family began to be literary when they were children, creating the fantasy worlds Angria and Gondal and writing down their stories. Angria was the creation of Charlotte and Branwell, Gondal of Emily and Anne. Nothing has survived of the prose pieces about Gondal, but twenty-three poems by Anne.

In addition to the twenty-one poems she contributed to the collection Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Currer was the pen name of Charlotte, Ellis that of Emily and Acton her own), published in 1846 , she wrote two novels: Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (German: Die Herrin von Wildfell Hall ), which she also published as Acton Bell . Agnes Gray appeared in December 1847 at the same time as her sister Emily's novel Wuthering Heights . She published the second novel in June 1848.

In both novels, Anne Brontë uses motifs from her own life and allows her ideas of morality and religion to flow into her works. Like her, the protagonist of Agnes Gray is a penniless pastor's daughter who struggles through life as a governess before late into a happy marriage. Features of Anne's workplaces can be found in the novel. The Irish writer George Moore extensively praised the work as "the most perfect prose story in English writing".

The Tenant of Wild Fell Hall ( The mistress of wild fur Hall ) is about a woman who earns her husband, a rampant alcoholic, leaving with their son to remove him from the influence of his father, and living alone. Today, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, a fact that is all the more understandable when you consider that until the passage of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870, married women were legally prohibited from owning property possess to file for divorce or obtain custody of their children.

Works

Film adaptations

literature

  • Betty Jay: Anne Brontë. Plymouth, Northcote House, 2000, ISBN 0-7463-0922-8
  • Lisa Paddock, Carl Rollyson: The Brontës A to Z. The essential reference to their lives and work. New York, Checkmark Books, 2003, ISBN 0-8160-4303-5

Web links

Commons : Anne Brontë  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Anne Brontë  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk
  2. ^ Stevie Davies: Introduction and Notes . In: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . Penguin Books, 1996, ISBN 978-0-14-043474-3 .
  3. ↑ The Lady of Wildfell Hall - BBC Mini-Series
personal data
SURNAME Brontë, Anne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Acton Bell (pseudonym); Action Bell (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH Thornton
DATE OF DEATH May 28, 1849
Place of death Scarborough