The Brontës’ very real and raw Irish roots
Brontës grew up an immigrant family with their father’s Irish accent. Charlotte married an Irishman but Anne’s work is most influenced by a feeling of being foreign
The Brontë Sisters by Patrick Branwell Brontë. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery / Getty Images
One of the oddest reactions to Sally Wainwright’s recent (brilliant) TV drama about the Brontës, To Walk Invisible, was an objection to the Yorkshire accents. Some fans had imagined the literary sisters speaking RP. I wonder what they’d have said if Wainwright had focused more on the Brontës’ childhood, when Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne still had Irish accents, inherited from their father. They lost them when they went to school. Yet they never lost a sense of being outsiders, of never quite fitting in.
Both their parents were strangers to Yorkshire. Their mother came from Cornwall, as did the aunt who came to help look after them after their mother died. But it was their father Patrick who really felt foreign. He had come a very long way from the mud cabin in Drumballyroney, Co Down where he had grown up in a large and very poor family, the son of a farmhand, fence-fixer and road-builder called Hugh Brunty. Their diet of porridge, potatoes, buttermilk and bread gave Patrick a lifetime of indigestion. They owned four books, and two were the Bible. At 12, Patrick went to work for a blacksmith.