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THE LIFE AND LITERARY PATH OF THE BRONTE SISTERS
Scientific advicer:
Shakhlo Khalilova
Student:
Madina Pardayeva
Economy and pedagogy university
Abstract:
In 1824, the four eldest girls (excluding Anne) entered the Clergy Daughters'
School at Cowan Bridge, which educated the children of less prosperous members of the
clergy, and had been recommended to Mr Brontë. The following year, Maria and Elizabeth
fell gravely ill and were removed from the school, later dying on 6 May and 15 June 1825,
respectively.
Key words:
"charity schools", Quarterly Review,
morals, realism,
challenge
Charlotte and Emily were also withdrawn from the school and returned to Haworth.
Charlotte expressed the traumatic impact that her sisters' deaths had on her in her future
works. In Jane Eyre, Cowan Bridge became Lowood, Maria inspired the young Helen Burns,
the cruel mistress Miss Andrews inspired the headmistress Miss Scatcherd, and the tyrannical
headmaster Rev. Carus Wilson, Mr Brocklehurst.
Tuberculosis, which afflicted Maria and Elizabeth in 1825, also caused the eventual deaths of
three of the surviving Brontës: Branwell in September 1848, Emily in December 1848, and,
finally, Anne in May 1849.
Patrick Brontë faced a challenge in arranging for the education of the girls of his family,
which was barely middle class. They lacked significant connections and he could not afford
the fees for them to attend an established school for young ladies. One solution was the
schools where the fees were reduced to a minimum—so called "charity schools"—with a
mission to assist families like those of the lower clergy.
(Barker had read in the Leeds Intelligencer of 6 November 1823 reports of cases in the Court
of Commons in Bowes: he later read of other cases, of 24 November 1824 near Richmond, in
the county of Yorkshire, where pupils had been discovered gnawed by rats and suffering so
badly from malnutrition that some of them had lost their sight.) Yet for Patrick, there was
nothing to suggest that the Reverend Carus Wilson's Clergy Daughters' School would not
provide a good education and good care for his daughters. The school was not expensive and
its patrons (supporters who allowed the school to use their names) were all respected people.
Among these was the daughter of Hannah More, a religious author and philanthropist who
took a particular interest in education. More was a close friend of the poet William Cowper,
who, like her, advocated extensive, proper and well-rounded education for young girls. The
pupils included the offspring of different prelates and even certain acquaintances of Patrick
Brontë including William Wilberforce, young women whose fathers had also been educated
at St John's College, Cambridge. Thus Brontë believed Wilson's school to have many of the
necessary guarantees needed for his daughters to receive proper schooling.
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The children became interested in writing from an early age, initially as a game. They all
displayed a talent for narrative, but for the younger ones it became a pastime to develop
them. At the center of the children's creativity were twelve wooden soldiers which Patrick
Brontë gave to Branwell at the beginning of June 1826. These toy soldiers instantly fired
their imaginations and they spoke of them as the Young Men, and gave them names.
However, it was not until December 1827 that their ideas took written form, and the
imaginary African kingdom of Glass Town came into existence, followed by the Empire of
Angria. Emily and Anne created Gondal, an island continent in the North Pacific, ruled by a
woman, after the departure of Charlotte in 1831. In the beginning, these stories were written
in little books, the size of a matchbox about 1.5 by 2.5 inches (38 mm × 64 mm) and
cursorily bound with thread. The pages were filled with close, minute writing, often in capital
letters without punctuation and embellished with illustrations, detailed maps, schemes,
landscapes and plans of buildings, created by the children according to their specializations.
The idea was that the books were of a size for the soldiers to read. The complexity of the
stories matured as the children's imaginations developed, fed by reading the three weekly or
monthly magazines to which their father had subscribed, or the newspapers that were bought
daily from John Greenwood's local news and stationery store.
Literary and artistic influence.
These fictional worlds were the product of fertile
imagination fed by reading, discussion and a passion for literature. Far from suffering from
the negative influences that never left them and which were reflected in the works of their
later, more mature years, the Brontë children absorbed them eagerly.
The periodicals that Patrick Brontë read were a mine of information for his children.
The Leeds Intelligencer and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, conservative and well written,
but better than the Quarterly Review that defended the same political ideas whilst addressing
a less-refined readership (the reason Mr. Brontë did not read it), were exploited in every
detail. Blackwood's Magazine, in particular, was not only the source of their knowledge of
world affairs, but also provided material for the Brontës' early writing. For instance, an article
in the June 1826 number of Blackwood's, provides commentary on new discoveries from the
exploration of central Africa. The map included with the article highlights geographical
features the Brontës reference in their tales: the Jibbel Kumera (the Mountains of the
Moon), Ashantee, and the rivers Niger and Calabar. The author also advises the British to
expand into Africa from Fernando Po, where, Christine Alexander notes, the Brontë children
locate the Great Glass Town. Their knowledge of geography was completed by
Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography, which the Brontës owned and annotated
heavily
The children's imagination was also influenced by three prints of engravings
in mezzotint by John Martin around 1820. Charlotte and Branwell made copies of the
prints Belshazzar's Feast, Déluge, and Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon
Gibeon (1816), which hung on the walls of the parsonage.
Martin's fantastic architecture is reflected in the Glass Town and Angrian writings, where he
appears himself among Branwell's characters and under the name of Edward de Lisle, the
greatest painter and portraitist of Verdopolis, the capital of Glass Town. One of Sir Edward
de Lisle's major works, Les Quatre Genii en Conseil, is inspired by Martin's illustration
for John Milton's Paradise Lost. Together with Byron, John Martin seems to have been one of
the artistic influences essential to the Brontës' universe.
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Anne's morals and realism.
The influence revealed by Agnes Grey and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall is much less clear. Anne's works are largely founded on her experience as a
governess and on that of her brother's decline. Furthermore, they demonstrate her conviction,
a legacy from her father, that books should provide moral education. This sense of moral duty
and the need to record it, are more evident in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The influence of
the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Gregory "Monk" Lewis and Charles
Maturin is noticeable, and that of Walter Scott too, if only because the heroine, abandoned
and left alone, resists importunities not only through her almost supernatural talents, but by
her powerful temperament.
Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, Villette and even The
Professor present a linear structure concerning characters who advance through life after
several trials and tribulations, to find a kind of happiness in love and virtue, recalling works
of religious inspiration of the 17th century such as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress or
his Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
In a more profane manner, the hero or
heroine follows a picaresque itinerary such as in Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Daniel
Defoe (1660–1731), Henry Fielding (1707–1764) and Tobias Smollett (1721–1771). This
lively tradition continued into the 19th century with the rags to riches genre to which almost
all the great Victorian romancers have contributed. The protagonist is thrown by fate into
poverty and after many difficulties achieves a golden happiness. Often an artifice is
employed to effect the passage from one state to another such as an unexpected inheritance, a
miraculous gift, grand reunions, etc, and in a sense it is the route followed by Charlotte's and
Anne's protagonists, even if the riches they win are more those of the heart than of the wallet.
Apart from its Gothic elements, Wuthering Heights moves like a Greek tragedy and
possesses its music, the cosmic dimensions of the epics of John Milton, and the power of the
Shakespearian theatre. One can hear the echoes of King Lear as well as the completely
different characters of Romeo and Juliet. The Brontës were also seduced by the writings
of Walter Scott, and in 1834 Charlotte exclaimed, "For fiction, read Walter Scott and only
him—all novels after his are without value."
Charlotte envisaged a joint publication by the three sisters. Anne was easily won over to the
project, and the work was shared, compared and edited. Once the poems had been chosen,
nineteen for Charlotte and twenty-one each for Anne and Emily, Charlotte went about
searching for a publisher. She took advice from William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh,
directors of one of their favourite magazines, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal. It is thought,
although no documents exist to support the claim, that they advised the sisters to contact
Aylott & Jones, a small publishing house at 8, Paternoster Row, London, who accepted, but
at the authors' own risk since they felt the commercial risk to the company was too great. The
work thus appeared in 1846, published using the male pseudonyms of Currer (Charlotte),
Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. These were very uncommon forenames but the initials
of each of the sisters were preserved and the patronym could have been inspired by that of the
vicar of the parish, Arthur Bell Nicholls. It was in fact on 18 May 1845 that he took up his
duties at Haworth, at the moment when the publication project was well advanced.
The book attracted hardly any attention. Only three copies were sold, of which one was
purchased by Fredrick Enoch, a resident of Cornmarket, Warwick, who in admiration, wrote
to the publisher to request an autograph—the only extant single document carrying the three
authors' signatures in their pseudonyms, and they continued creating their prose, each one
producing a book a year later.
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ISSN: 2692-5206, Impact Factor: 12,23
American Academic publishers, volume 05, issue 04,2025
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Literature:
1. Shirley, Michelle. "Social Class and the Gothic in Wuthering Heights." Victorian Studies
Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1-20.
2. Barker, Juliet. "The Meaning of the Moors: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Wuthering
Heights." Journal of Literary Psychology, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, pp. 178–198.
3. Rowland, Richard. "The Unreliable Narrators of Wuthering Heights." Studies in
Narrative Structure, vol. 19, no. 3, 1998, pp. 91–110.
4. Bell, Daniel. "Gothic Love and Revenge: Wuthering Heights and the Anti-Romantic
Tradition." The Modern Language Review, vol. 77, no. 4, 1982, pp. 769-784.
5. Jones, G. A. "The Tragic Heroism of Heathcliff: A Marxist Approach." Studies in
English Literature, vol. 35, no. 3, 1996, pp. 212–230.
6. Jalilovna, K. S. (2022). Common Similarities and Differences of Uzbek and English
Fairy Tales. European Journal of Innovation in Nonformal Education, 2(1), 366-369.
7. Jalilovna, K. S. (2022). COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF UZBEK AND ENGLISH
FAIRY TALES. IJTIMOIY FANLARDA INNOVASIYA ONLAYN ILMIY JURNALI,
80-83.
