The story of the great English novelist Charlotte Brontë, who died 150 years ago last Thursday, began and ended in Ireland. Her father was born Patrick Prunty (or Brunty) in Emdale, Co Down, on St Patrick's Day 1777, the eldest of 10 children of an agricultural labourer.
Charlotte's father changed his name to Brontë (Greek for thunder) while at St John's College, Cambridge, between 1802 and 1806. He visited his family after he graduated, returned to England and never visited Ireland again. Ordained into the Church of England in 1807, he held a number of curacies until he was appointed perpetual curate to the villages of Haworth, Stanbury and Oxenhope in the parish of Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1820. He held the living at Haworth for 41 years.
He married Maria Branwell, a Cornish woman of gentle birth, at the end of December 1812. They had five daughters and one son: Maria (born 1814), Elizabeth (1815), Charlotte (1816), Patrick Branwell (1817), Emily Jane (1818) and Anne (1820). Patrick Brontë was to outlive all his children.
All the Brontë children died tragically young but two in particular made their mark in English literature. Their home was the bleak parsonage of Haworth, overlooking a grim and over-used graveyard. There they turned in upon themselves and created imaginary worlds that they recorded in tiny notebooks. They created the fantasy lands of Angria and Gondal, built around the romantic adventures of Branwell's toy soldiers.
Their mother died when they were very young and they were raised by a stern aunt. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte's most successful novel, Jane too is raised by a harsh aunt, Mrs Reed. In 1824, all the girls except Anne were sent to a cheap boarding school for clergymen's daughters at Cowan Bridge, where the two eldest died. Jane Eyre is sent to Lowood Asylum, a charitable institution, where she spends a wretched time in appalling conditions.
After the deaths of their sisters, Charlotte and Emily were brought home and educated by their father until 1831, when Charlotte went for a year to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head. In 1835, she returned there as a teacher but could not endure the drudgery and tried two posts as governess with the same lack of success. When Jane Eyre escapes from Lowood, she takes on the post of governess at Thornfield Hall to Adele, daughter of Edward Rochester, a man of little courtesy and cynical disposition.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne planned to open their own private school and, to increase their qualifications, the first two went to Brussels to learn French. They returned on the death of their aunt but their school project got nowhere. Charlotte went back to Brussels for a year as an English teacher in the school of Constantine Heger where, unhappily, she fell in love with her employer. Her first novel, The Professor, which was not published until after her death, and her last novel, Villette (published in 1853), were both about the unfortunate Brussels interlude in her life.
When she returned to Haworth, she found her brother Branwell sinking into incurable alcoholism. She discovered a manuscript of poems by Emily and, after much difficulty, persuaded her to let them be published, she and Anne also contributing to the small joint volume, published under the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The venture cost them £50 but sold only two copies in the first year.
They then decided to embark on novel writing. Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Gray were published, but Charlotte's The Professor was rejected. With the rejection, though, came encouragement which enabled her to finish Jane Eyre. It was a resounding success and is one of the great novels of the English language.
It would be nice to record that with literary success came great happiness in the lives of the Brontës. It was the very opposite, in fact, because within a year all Charlotte's siblings were dead and she and her father were left alone. Amazingly, she found the strength and resolve to carry on. She was 33 at the time.
Arthur Bell Nicholls came from a similar background to Patrick Brontë (he was born in Killead, Co Antrim on January 6th, 1819) and followed a similar path (he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1844). His first clerical position was the curacy of Haworth, which he took up in May 1845. A few months after his arrival, Branwell returned in disgrace, and Nicholls was there through the tragedy of his decline and death, and the deaths of Emily and Anne in 1849-50. So, probably no one outside the parsonage itself would have been more familiar with the Brontë family than Arthur Nicholls.
His proposal of marriage to Charlotte in December 1852 came as a complete surprise to her and her father. Patrick Brontë withheld his consent and Charlotte declined the offer. Mr Brontë, angered by his curate's presumption, made life so uncomfortable for him that he resigned and left Haworth, taking up a position 40 miles south and corresponding with Charlotte. They used to meet secretly and by Christmas 1853 she had accepted him and persuaded her father to agree.
They married in June 1854 and honeymooned for a month in Ireland. Their marriage was happy and tragically short. Charlotte, in the early stages of pregnancy, caught a chill after getting wet while out walking on the moors; it developed into consumption and led to her death in March 1855.
Arthur Nicholls looked after Mr Brontë until his death in 1861 and, when he was passed over for his father-in-law's living, he returned to his roots in Banagher, Co Offaly (he had spent 10 years there with his uncle, Rev Allan Bell), and never worked as a priest again. He, the last member of the Brontë family, died there in December 1906.