Dedicated to Anne Brontë...

17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849

Anne Brontë
watercolour by Charlotte Brontë, 1834

Anne Brontë was born on this day in 1820 in Thornton. The youngest member of the Brontë literary family was author of Agnes Grey 81847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and a Poems with her pen name as Acton Bell.

In 1850, her sister Charlotte in Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell wrote a tribute to her two dead sisters. It was just over a year after the deaths of Anne and Emily and the combined edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey became due for a re-print. 

Anne Brontë
drawing in pencil by Charlotte Brontë, April 17, 1833

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"Anne's character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well endowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great."

Anne died only five month after Emily. 

The Brontë sisters embrace the night

In the video below,  Ann Dinsdale, curator at the Brontë Parsonage describes the night time routine at Haworth. I've enjoyed it very much and I think it's very nice share it today to remenber Anne on her bithday!

Listen the programme

Here are two beautiful poems about night written by Emily and Anne. 

The night is darkening round me 

Poem by Emily Brontë

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me,

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow;

The storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

Haworth Parsonage as it was in the Brontës' lifetime.

Night  

Poem by Anne Brontë

I love the silent hour of night,

For blissful dreams may then arise,

Revealing to my charmed sight

What may not bless my waking eyes! 

And then a voice may meet my ear

That death has silenced long ago;

And hope and rapture may appear

Instead of solitude and woe. 

Cold in the grave for years has lain

The form it was my bliss to see,

And only dreams can bring again

The darling of my heart to me. 

Anne Brontë

A drawing by Anne Brontë

On March 2016 a new Anne biography will be released. It’s called ‘In Search Of Anne Bronte’ by Nick Holland.

The story

 Anne Bronte, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Bronte sisters, remains a bestselling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontes, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. This revealing new biography opens Anne's most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationship with her sister Charlotte.