The Brontë Sisters: Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë

Vulgar History Podcast

The Brontë Sisters: Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë  

February 11, 2026

Ann: Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and we are in our Regency Era season, that is where we’re talking about people from what I define as the Regency era, other people do too. It’s like, the late 1700s into the early 1800s, right up until the Victorians basically. So, we’re really butting up to the end of what some people would consider the Regency era, but we had to talk about the Brontës. We’re talking about Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë. Some others will come up, but those are the main ones. 

The reason we’re talking about them this week is largely because there’s a new movie version of Wuthering Heights that is just coming out, and Wuthering Heights was a book by Emily Brontë. Probably the other most famous Brontë book is Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre. Anne Brontë was also there, bringing some little sister energy, and we’ll talk about that. But they all wrote— Actually, no, Emily only wrote one book. But there’s various Brontë books. We’re going to talk about them all. 

I’m not a Brontë girlie, I’m a Brontë-neutral person, but I know there’s so many people are passionate about them. And one person who’s passionate about them is today’s guest, Lana Wood Johnson, who I think I’ve just unmuted. Have I? Lana, try to say something… Yeah, you’re still muted… I don’t know how to unmute you. It’s terrible! 

Lana: I have unmuted myself. 

Ann: Oh, thank you, Lana. You know what? You just arrived like a ghost in the moors. [laughs] 

Lana: If anybody can, it’ll be me. I bring the correct energy. 

Ann: Through the mists of the moors… [chuckles] Is it Lana? 

Lana: I have perfected my shut-in era, and I will be here as your Brontë stand-in. 

Ann: Yeah, so we’re talking about the Brontës. So specifically, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë. Those are who people consider the Brontës. One thing I’ll just mention right off the bat is that sort of like Mary Shelley, their lives are kind of equally famous as their most famous books, is part of what’s up with the Brontës. The reason that that happened is because their books were successful in their lives. They all died quite young of tuberculosis, which we’ll get into; this is probably the most tuberculosis deaths per episode in Vulgar History history. 

Lana: Which is all the more reason to have me. 

Ann: Lana does have a lot of knowledge about tuberculosis, yes. If you listened to our Vulgarpiece Theatre on Patreon, the episode about Tombstone, we really get into tuberculosis talk. But anyway, so after the last Brontë died – I won’t say which one that is because maybe you don’t know the order – but after the last Brontë died, their friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, wrote a nonfiction book about the Brontës, and then they became celebrities. They were all dead, but they became famous. So, it’s like, their books were popular, and then this biography came out, and then they, in death, became popular. There’s not a lot of other authors, I’m sure there are others, but to this extent, where it’s like, their lives are often as famous as their books. And it’s because it’s all the same, like, gothic spooky vibe. Would you agree, Lana? 

Lana: I mean, the only other one that I would compare them to is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald. He did it because he was an asshole, they did it because they were strange. And I love this for them! 

Ann: I love that just as I’ve been researching the Brontës, and I think it’s because Wuthering Heights, the movie, is coming out, there’s a lot more Brontë content being fed to me on various algorithms, but there’s so many… There’s, like, T-shirts that say like, “The Brontës” and it’s all done up like a heavy metal band. People stan these weird, weird, weird women. Actually, I want to say something that the three of them and you and I all have in common as of the day that this podcast comes out is we’re all published authors. So… 

Lana: Huzzah! Congratulations. The long con has worked. 

Ann: Yes, yes. Just to drop this into this episode, because I’m going to have to, my book, Rebel of the Regency, is available now from any store, most places in the world, frankly, you can figure it out. Go to RebelOfTheRegency.com for your links. I’ll talk about the events coming up later. 

But I will say that Lana and I are both older than any Brontë ever became [both laugh] except for the dad. So, they had a live fast— No, it’s not a live fast, die young. They did not live fast. 

Lana: Survive as much as you can. [giggles] That was their mentality. 

Ann: There’s so much goth stuff in this, like, it really brings me to mind of like Mary Shelley, you know, learning to write on her dead mother’s grave, like, that’s the vibes, sort of. It’s really just kind of like these girls growing up and everything… I just feel like the sun never came out a day in their life. 

Lana: Having been a goth, there’s multiple kinds of goth. And Mary Shelley is the extrovert goth that, like, she was just dramatic all of the time, and she did all of the things, and lived her whole life. The Brontës were my kind of goth, which is the traumatized goth that sits in the corner and is just dark and spooky, and you’re kind of sure she might be a witch. That was their goth energy that they brought to the table. 

Ann: Yes. Okay, who were these Brontës? Where did their name come from? So, you’ll see in the episode name, it’s B-R-O-N-T-Ë with umlauts, that is a name that their father invented, and I will tell you the story of who they are and why their father chose that name. 

So, the Brontë parents. Their mother was called Mariah Branwell. Branwell becomes the name of their brother; there is a boy Brontë who, unfortunately, we’re going to have to talk about a lot, but that’s where the name Branwell comes from. 

Lana: [chuckles] Unfortunately, Branwell. 

Ann: Yeah. You had said when I was reading this and just kind of messaging you about my Brontë research, Lana, the Brontës are sort of like Jane Austen’s family, but in, like, not sort of a Star Trek mirror universe, but it’s sort of like, what if the Austens were all dying of tuberculosis constantly? 

Lana: What if the Austens were sad? 

Ann: Yeah. What if the Austens never saw the sun? 

Lana: I have a reputation of writing Jane Austen-style, cutesy, comedy of manners. My heart and soul is a Brontë sister, and I don’t know how I achieved it. But everything about me, like, deep inside is a Brontë, except for Branwell. I’m not Branwell. 

Ann: Branwell doesn’t count. Branwell is just like… I don’t know, every family has a Branwell. Do you know the meme that’s like, it’s that street, I feel like it’s in San Francisco, something where there’s the really bright pink house next to it is, like, the black house. Do you know what I mean? 

Lana: Mm-hm. 

Ann: Yeah, my friend Annika was just sharing that, and somebody had defined it as, like, the black house, that’s Emily Brontë, and then the pink house, it’s like, that’s Charlotte Brontë. I’m like, okay. But next to it’s a very practical house, and it’s like, and this is Anne Brontë. And then, I was like, Branwell would be like a lamppost on the street, if anything. 

Lana: Kind of falling over, and everybody calls maintenance to fix it, and no one comes. 

Ann: Yeah, Branwell is just kind of also there. Anyway, the mother is Maria Branwell. She was the daughter of an affluent grocer and tea merchant from Cornwall, so she’s bringing some money into this family. Their dad is Patrick Brontë, he is from Ireland. His name was originally Brunty. Is that a common surname in Ireland? Don’t know. But that was what his name was at birth. He was one of ten children born to a poor Irish family in the parish of Drumballyroney in County Down. 

I am always excited when an Irish person comes into one of these episodes because I’m really interested in Irish history. He’s very much just kind of like, in this era of what’s going on in Ireland… So, he’s Anglican. I think Maria, the mom, was Catholic, but he becomes an Anglican curate. He left Ireland because things were shitty there because of colonization, and he wanted opportunities and people in Ireland saw that like, “Oh, this guy’s, he’s smart.” He wanted to be a writer as well. And so, this is despite his very poor upbringing, I’m saying he wanted to be a writer even though the family only ever owned four books, two of which were the Bible. Growing up, they ate what I would call the traditional diet of a poverty-stricken Irish family: porridge, buttermilk, bread, and potatoes. And he had lifelong digestive issues, which, that’s probably part of why. Anyway, but they’re like, “Out of these ten kids, this one could maybe make something of himself.” So, he ended up getting educated; he was educated in Latin and Greek by local clergymen before he got to St. John’s College in Cambridge, coming over to England. 

At the time that he came over to England, I think there was a lot of anti-Irish xenophobia going on. So, I think this is part of where he changed his last name to try and… Like so many people do when you move to a new city, you go to college, you’re like, “I’m going to go by my middle name!” Like, you know, “My name’s not Elizabeth…” 

Lana: “No one must know who I am!”

Ann: “I’m not Patrick Brunty, I’m Patrick Brontë, with umlauts on it!” 

Lana: “That makes me German, really.” 

Ann: Yeah. I know, the umlauts are… And I will say there’s a memorial to the Brontës – not Branwell, but the three main ones – there’s a memorial to them in Westminster Abbey and it was recently the Brontë Association or something, like the memorial was done, but they didn’t put the umlauts on and this association was like, “Put on the umlauts!” and then they eventually came in with a drill and they’re like, berp! Berp! 

Lana: Which has been Brontë fan energy. It’s like, “No! The umlauts are important.” 

Ann: Well, and they are because it’s like, I was thinking about this, it’s like, yes, so he invented this name, and lots of people invent their names; no shade, no hate against people who invent their own names. All names are invented, so is money, but just like, he invented this name, and then the daughters were like, “That is our name,” and that is how they always wrote their name, they always put the umlauts on. So, this change happened, it stuck. 

Lana: And honestly, if there wasn’t, you know, rampant tuberculosis, they needed to be able to merge with English society. They were smart enough for it, but you know, then tuberculosis ruins everything. 

Ann: There is, I mean, just like, trigger warning: tuberculosis. [laughs] I don’t have a gong that I can play every time someone in this story dies of tuberculosis, but if I did, I would. Or like, a church bell, just like, blerrrr! Guess what? Tuberculosis. 

So anyway, Maria and Patrick got married, he’s an Anglican curate, and so he took a job in the Yorkshire village of Thornton near Bradford, which is where their children were born. That place is still a museum that’s called, like, the Brontë Birthplace or something, because they were born there, but then they moved somewhere else, which is also a museum, because that’s where they lived for most of the rest of their lives. So, they had daughters. [laughs] 

Lana: So many daughters.

Ann: Except… and Branwell. So, the oldest daughters, so there was Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte was the third, then Branwell, then Emily, and then Anne was the baby. So, in 1820, which is the year that George IV became King of England, to all the fans of Prinny out there keeping track. 

Lana: Why are you here? [laughs] 

Ann: Yeah. Welcome, but also, like, look at your life choices. 

Lana: [giggles] It’s like anti-stan accounts. 

Ann: Actually, you know what? I want to say trigger warning, Lana and I giggle a lot. [laughs]

Lana: [laughs] Sorry. 

Ann: If you’re listening to this for a very serious discussion of the Brontës, you’ll have that, but it will be in between a lot of jokes and giggles. And you know what? With the Brontës, it’s the sort of story, it’s like, if you don’t laugh, then [laughs] how do you survive? 

Lana: If you don’t have dark humour, you’re not meant for the Brontës. They’re not for you. [giggles]

Ann: No. 

Lana: It’s okay to walk away and wait for— Go back to the Jane Austen episode. 

Ann: Go back to the Jane Austen episode. And honestly, Lana, having you here is similar to the Jane Austen episode. That’s why I brought on my guest there because I was like, I know they’re a Jane Austen… There is such a fandom for that, and I’m like, I wanted to respect that and have somebody on who brings that. And with the Brontës, I need you here to just bring that Brontë energy, because I’m just here with names and facts, tuberculosis statistics, but you’re coming in as, like, a passionate fan of one of the books. You’ll find out which one of those books when we get to them writing books. 

Lana: I’m a passionate fan of two of the books. I’m just passionate in a very different way than some people. [giggles] Again, we’ll get to that later. 

Ann: We will get to what the books are. So, the thing about Patrick, the dad, he is like… Part of the whole Brontës saga— And so, again, their story was written by this woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who, I believe she’s the author of North and South, the book that is such a good miniseries. 

Lana: One of the best miniseries of all time that is absolutely on the Vulgarpiece Theatre list. 

Ann: Oh, it’s so good. So, Elizabeth Gaskell, she wrote, like, “Here’s who the Brontës were,” and that was based on her friendship with Charlotte Brontë and how Charlotte Brontë related stories to her. So, you know, like any history, that’s as close to first person as you can get, really, but also… We’ll take this with the grain of salt that we take any sort of person describing something. 

But through Charlotte and what she told Elizabeth Gaskell, Patrick was a pretty horrid, like, terrifying father; he had mood swings, he had rages, he had a lot of strong passions, which, you know what? [laughs] So does Emily, so genetically, that seems true anyway. So, what happens is the dad becomes the curate of this place, they have all these children, and then they move to the village of Haworth on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. So, he became the curate of St. Michael and All Angels’ Church. And so, in terms of this position, his salary was “modest,” but the job came with a house for his huge family of weird daughters and Branwell. And so, they got to live there, and it was in this house overlooking the churchyard and the moors. We’re going to talk about what that means for the water supply shortly, Lana, so don’t worry. 

Lana: I will hold off on the water supply. [laughs]

Ann: But what I will say is so, Patrick…. Maria Branwell, the mom, she died very soon after they arrived in Haworth, probably some sort of cancer. She died, and then he tried to find another woman to marry him, but no one would. So, like, that might say something about what he was like as a person. 

Lana: That says a lot, considering most people were down to remarry. 

Ann: Yeah. No, he had like tried to remarry, and everyone’s just kind of like, “No thanks.” So, he’s just got these like six very young children… 

Lana: Especially as a curate! Like, he had a guaranteed salary. 

Ann: Yeah, it’s like, how unpleasant was this man? 

Lana: Well, I mean, probably Branwell tells us what was going on with him. 

Ann: Yeah. So, if he’s kind of like Branwell, but older. Part of probably why he struggled to find a wife as well was because the whole he was Irish thing and people were xenophobic against Irish people. So, initially, his children, because the mother died and he was raising them, and they didn’t really see anybody else, they all spoke with Irish accents, which I think is interesting because the only people they saw were each other and him, so they all just spoke like him. I think later in life, they entered the world and met other people, and their accents kind of shifted, but I do think it’s interesting this— 

Lana: Some of them. 

Ann: [chuckles] Some of the Brontës entered the world. Emily… did not. Anyway, so he’s the sort of dad that we’ve… It’s kind of a bit like Mary Wollstonecraft’s dad, he’s just got such a chip on his shoulder and, like, understandably, for how society sucks, and he feels like he deserves better. And like, yeah, but not everyone turns that into violent rages. 

Lana: Sir, you have children. 

Ann: Yeah, I get that you feel unjustly treated by the world, but also, you know, you have six very young children. Anyway, so they’re living in Haworth, living conditions were poor, high levels of early mortality. Potentially, this is related to the water supply contaminated by runoff from the graveyard. 

Lana: Which is the most goth thing, including anything Emily does.  

Ann: So, they’re just drinking cemetery water, this family. 

Lana: Almost their whole lives. 

Ann: Because they live there, like non-spoiler, even though some of them leave, they always return to what’s now called the Brontë Parsonage. So, they’re just drinking this graveyard water their whole lives. “Historians have speculated that these factors may have contributed to their deaths of tuberculosis.” You know, tuberculosis caused the deaths of, like, everyone in the story, except for the mom, that was cancer, but that’s because she only just moved there, she hadn’t drunk in the cemetery water that much yet. But I feel like the cemetery water would just kind of deplete your immune system to some extent, right? 

Lana: That’s the working theory. 

Ann: Actually, I want to say, in terms of where am I getting this information from, I perused various books about the Brontës; there’s also a very hearty Wikipedia entry about them; the Brontë Parsonage website has lots of information. But if you want to read up on the Brontës, I would say The Brontës by Juliet Barker is kind of, like, the book. There’s also a book called The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives and Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz, which shows some pictures of things, which I will describe to you later. 

Anyway, so they are these kids growing up with this kind of angry dad drinking cemetery juice in the Yorkshire moors.

Lana: They don’t feel like they belong because they’re Irish. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. So, six children, and then eventually – and maybe this is part of why Patrick stops trying to find a wife – their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, their mother’s sister, comes to help out. So, it’s kind of like, well, she can raise the children, so he’s like, “Great, I don’t need a wife then. Sweet.” So, she was there throughout their lives, basically. But also, the sudden death of their mother, like, that’s distressing to people of any age. But I would say, like, at this point, Charlotte was five years old, I feel like Emily and Anne were younger, so it’s a very young loss that they’re dealing with. But get used to it, because guess what? Nothing but more family death to come. 

So, three years later, three years after the death of the mom, Patrick sent the three, no, the four oldest sisters, all of the children, except for Branwell and Anne, who’s the baby… So, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, the girls were all sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. At this point, Mariah was ten, Elizabeth was nine, Charlotte was eight, Emily was five. They previously had no formal education, which is not odd. We’ve talked a bunch this series about what kind of schooling did girls get. So, that’s not strange. 

I do have some quotes here. Charlotte’s school report mentions that “Charlotte writes indifferently and knows nothing of grammar, geography, history or accomplishments, although she is altogether clever of her age.” So, it was the same sort of family, kind of like the Austens, where initially, I think the dad was focusing all the educational stuff on Branwell, because like, that’s the son, let’s give him a good education. These girls, they just have to learn the skills to like be wives or whatever. 

Lana: They’ll clearly use it. [giggles]

Ann: I mean, Branwell is just… I’m trying to think if there’s been someone as useless… There’s been so many people in so many episodes. Listeners, let me know. But Branwell is just… Oh, Branwell! I don’t think any teacher would have said that Branwell was altogether clever of his age. What Branwell is giving me in these early years of just, like, a bunch of children growing up in the moors, even though they’re siblings, but it’s a bit like in Little Women, how the girls play with Laurie when they’re little kids. It’s kind of like, here’s a bunch of girls, and here’s a boy who they let play with them, and he’s into it. As children, they all got along with each other really well. 

Lana: I get the feeling that, like, he wasn’t particularly clever, and all the girls kind of were too clever, and he’s like the anti-Henry; he just didn’t have that spark to support them in any way, but he liked going along with their fun. 

Ann: He liked having a good time, Branwell, and we’ll see what looks like as an adult, again, later on. 

So, this school, this school which is called… Lana, you call it the trauma bonding—

Lana: The trauma boarding school. If you have read Jane Eyre, you know what school this is. [laughs]

Ann: Yeah, so here’s the thing, and as we come across different parts of different stories, you or I may mention the Brontë sisters’ books are all fictional novels, but they’re highly derived from their personal experiences of things, to the extent that, like, when these novels are published… They didn’t know a lot of people in the world, right? So, when the books were published, it’s like, “Wait, is this me?” It’s like, “ It kind of has to be, you’re the only person she’s ever met who is from Brussels. So, yeah, sir.” 

Lana: They really did originate writing people you hate into a story to kill them off. They really brought that energy to the publishing world. 

Ann: Yeah, it’s a whole… Like, that advice of “Write what you know,” they’re like, “Okay!” 

Lana: Done! 

Ann: A book full of shitty people who die. 

Anyway, so the school was horrible. There’s unsanitary conditions, they were not fed well, frequent outbreaks of disease, and after an outbreak of typhus, the two oldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, both fell ill and died. 

Lana: Typhus is a disease that comes from unsanitary conditions. It’s not an infection or a water disease. It’s literally, like, bugs living on you disease. So, that tells you a lot about the school. 

Ann: It was horrific to watch the two oldest sisters die. So, now Charlotte is the oldest one left, and she does step into this big sister energy very hard. But she also said, she claimed, and this is through Elizabeth Gaskell’s book about her, that the conditions at the school had permanently affected her own health – I’m sure it did! – and her personal development, because she was the oldest of the people at the school. Emily, we’ll see how it affected Emily. But health-wise, Charlotte, like she was always very short, she didn’t… Emily became more tall. She had very poor eyesight. Like, I think that the older you were, the more this affected you. 

Lana: She was probably also severely malnourished. I mean, obviously grew up on gray water and then went to a school that, like, didn’t heat anything, and didn’t feed you, and didn’t treat you like a person. 

Ann: Much like… Actually, we should tell the listeners, we’re going to talk a bit about Jane Eyre in this episode, but if you want to hear Lana talk a lot about Jane Eyre, join the Patreon because we’re going to record that after, Jane Eyre chat.

Lana: This is the equivalent of her letting me talk about the Holy Roman Empire. This is my other Holy Roman Empire. [giggles]

Ann: So, just so that we can stick to this Brontë episode, the Jane Eyre discussion will be on Patreon later. But just for people who haven’t read Jane Eyre or haven’t read it in a while, Jane Eyre goes to a shitty boarding school where her friend dies, right? 

Lana: Yes. Well, everybody dies, she gets sent home. Well, no, she doesn’t get sent home. She survives. [giggles]

Ann: Everyone dies except for Jane Eyre. 

Lana: Thriving, no. Surviving, yes. 

Ann: So, after the deaths of the two oldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, Patrick, I mean, to his credit, was just like, “Wait a minute. Maybe this school is terrible.” So, he brought Charlotte and Emily back home, and he arranged for them to be taught at home, I guess with tutors or something. Let me just see. So yeah, I have in my notes just a few examples of how the headmaster of the school in Jane Eyre is exactly like the headmaster of the school that they went to, to the extent that the real-life guy threatened to sue her for libel. 

Lana: Which is, like, a choice you make. Why would you admit that? 

Ann: Yeah, why would you be like…

Lana: “Oh, how clever and interesting that she is, that she made up this horrible character that I’ve never considered remotely like myself?” 

Ann: Exactly. Like, just bring it into it. It’s just like, did you run a school where all the children died? Mmm, okay. Interesting that you admit to that. 

So, back at the parsonage, which is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Charlotte, nine years old, oldest sister, and she takes over care of her younger siblings under the supervision of their aunt, Elizabeth. Although it did say Patrick arranged for schooling. I think part of the schooling was like, Branwell went to school, and then they could read his books after, or something like that. 

Lana: Or they could tell him what it means. He went to school, and then he asked questions, and they’re like, “Oh, this is what they’re talking about.” Just like, “Ahh, yes. That makes sense.” 

Ann: And they would do all the homework for him or something, because they were all intellectually curious sorts of people. And Patrick, the dad, remember, he wanted to be a writer and stuff, and he went to college. He encouraged the children to read widely, to take an interest in current affairs, to enjoy music, art, and poetry. He introduced them to the work of Lord Byron, who we’ve talked about on this podcast before, and this becomes very significant to them and their writing in terms of the Byronic hero figure, because the Brontë sisters really like a Byronic— Lana, can you explain a Byronic hero? 

Lana: They like broody people who think they’re very important. [laughs] They like toxic men so much… So much! They don’t have any, but they like them. 

Ann: They like the concept of it. So, Lord Byron, his work really… And we’ve talked about Lord Byron as a person; there’s a whole episode about it if you want to hear how much I hate him. But when you read Jane Eyre, when you read Wuthering Heights, it’s just like, what is a Byronic hero? Oh, these guys in these books. Okay. 

Lana: They really are the OG dark romance girlies. Like, they know that they’re toxic men. They would never actually, like, you know, spend time with one, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t love them. 

Ann: So, what’s really interesting is they did read very widely, like they read the newspapers and stuff, they knew what was going on in the world. The dad shared newspapers with them, her mother had subscribed to something called the Lady’s Magazine, and Charlotte got to— They were still left behind as she read them. Although Patrick later burned these magazines because they “contained foolish love stories.” So, like, okay, Patrick. 

Lana: Too late for that. 

Ann: Yeah. Anyway. So, the children. This is such an interesting part of the whole saga. This is them as a gang, like, this is where I just really picture them… To me, just because I know the Little Women movies quite well, the scenes where they’re playing together, and they put on plays, and Laurie is— It’s like that is the vibe. Like, the Brontës weren’t interacting with anyone else in the world, just there with their dad and their Irish accent and their mom’s sister. So, they created plays together using their toys, and they created, I don’t know how much you know about this Lana, but this whole ongoing, I don’t know what we would call it now, like, shared role-playing universe. 

Lana: They had their own little shared world. They were just basically writing their own fanfic from the beginning, which is really telling of what they ended up writing is, like, it gives that overly dramatic soap opera-y vibe. 

Ann: So, what it’s called is the Glass Town. It’s a shared fantasy world. Charlotte and Branwell initiated it; Emily and Anne joined. And then later, there was a schism, and Emily and Anne set off and did their own world called Gondal. [laughs] 

Lana: [laughs] Which again, very fanfic vibes. 

Ann: It’s extremely that. Branwell Brontë, here’s what he’s giving us. He’s giving us a very famous portrait of his sisters later on. He drew a map of the Glass Town Federation. 

Lana: Pre or post schism? [laughs]

Ann: [laughs] Post, so you can see which area each of the siblings oversee. So, the main characters of the Glass Town Confederacy were initially… Again, like, they’re keeping up to date with news and events and stuff. So, it was two great leaders, and they were basically Napoleon and Wellington, but with fake, made-up names, and then as it went on, it became more and more their own original IP. 

Lana: The fandom drift is real. 

Ann: Okay, so what it is that the main characters are Zamorna, the Duke of Wellington’s son and Alexander Percy, known as Northangerland, who are, guess what? Byronic heroes. So, they… 

Lana: Very broody. Much staring at things. 

Ann: What I love, what I love, like I mentioned, the dad brought the newspapers and stuff, and so they have these little… If you go to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and I saw pictures of these in some of the biographies, they wrote stories about their fan fiction world, but to make books, like they didn’t have paper, but they would just tear off the sides of a pamphlet or the sides of a piece of newspaper and write in the— And they’re using like, ink pens, you know, with loose ink, like the teeniest, tiniest little handwriting, these doll-sized books. A lot of these still exist at the museum. But this is what they were doing. So, they’re just, like… These are creative, creative little kids. 

Lana: They make do with what little they have. 

Ann: Yeah! And then they wrote, like, fake magazines for themselves with stories in them that are like, takedown of each other’s ideas. 

Lana: This is what happens when you only have, like, three friends, and they’re your siblings. 

Ann: Yeah, when that is your whole world, it’s just like… But also, like you mentioned, the trauma bonding school. Especially Charlotte and Emily, having gone through that and witnessing the deaths of their sisters, they were so close in this trauma bond type way, like, very codependent. 

Lana: Yeah. They realized that they can’t trust anyone else and that no one is safe anywhere. Like, everybody dies. They’re just little goth kids living their little sad goth lives in the moors. 

Ann: So, Branwell made a fake magazine, a homemade magazine, called Branwell’s Magazine. [laughs]

Lana: He named it after himself? How strange! 

Ann: Anyway, so as this goes, like Charlotte… And again, we know the most about Charlotte because that’s she was friends with Elizabeth Gaskell and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the biography of the Brontës. But we know that Charlotte continued… She was interested in writing, you know, like myself, like a little kid, you write books for fun, and then when you get older, you’re like, “No, I like writing. I’m going to try…” So, she got into writing poetry, which Branwell published in Branwell’s Magazine, [both laugh] a magazine with circulation of one, which was their house address. Anyway, so she started writing novellas, which were sort of like, set in the world of their Byronic heroes. But then, she started to shift towards writing about more realistic things and not about their fake nerd thing. 

Lana: “Realistic” with like, air quotes around it. Realistic, like the soap opera realistic, not realism. 

Ann: Real world. Yeah, there’s not monsters. 

Lana: We’re not going to like, fake, here. [laughs] You can try to make a case for it, you will fail. 

Ann: So, Charlotte, when she was 15, she was sent away to another boarding school in Mirfield. Here’s the thing. On this podcast, I have learned that when I include the names of what are, to me, random, obscure place names in any of these stories, someone inevitably sends me a message being like like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you mentioned Mirfield. That’s where my grandmother lives.” [laughs] So, I’m just like throwing some place names out here just for the girlies. 

So, she went out to Roe Head boarding school, and she became friends… [laughs] I’m just startled because she made friends with people who are not her sisters, good for her. Two girls of her own age, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. 

Lana: Ellen, huh? 

Ann: Is there someone called Ellen in one of her books? 

Lana: No, there’s someone called Helen, and there are theories about Helen. 

Ann: Helen. Okay, well, we know that she’s really kind of cloaking people’s real identities in her books. [laughs]

Lana: Correct. And it’s her best friend, in the letter-writing best friend style. 

Ann: We’ve talked a lot this series about women and girls writing very passionate pen pal letters to each other, and what does that mean? And so, this just comes right in line with Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with those women from Edinburgh who ran the girls’ school. So just like, more gals being pals, gal pals. 

Lana: Very, very good friends. 

Ann: Passionate women friendships. So, both Mary and Ellen, I think when Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the book, she spoke to people who knew Charlotte, and both Mary and Ellen recalled, “Charlotte had old-fashioned clothing and an Irish accent.” So, all the way up to this point, which is again, like, of course, she still has the accent because she’s still not engaging with the world other than her father and her siblings. But even into her teens, she still had this accent. But the old-fashioned clothing is interesting. 

Lana: Well, they’re poor. They’re not from a wealthy parsonage or anything like that. 

Ann: No. He’s the parson, and he has five, or I guess at this point, three daughters. There’s going to be hand-me-downs, like, they’re probably wearing their mom’s old dresses. Where are they going to get clothes from? 

Lana: And it’s not like he’s going to go out of his way to get them more things. He’s got to get that for Branwell. 

Ann: Branwell, I’m sure, gets the clothes. It’s yet again, how many times in this podcast, where it’s just like, you have a family, and the girls are great, but it’s like, “Oh, but the son is where we have to focus.” Like, how many times like there’s somebody like Fredegund and her sons, or Agrippina and Nero, where it’s just these useless sons, and they get all schooling and all the attention is like, well, because they’re the boy. It’s like, there’s so many women around you who would have benefited so much more. 

Anyway. So, Ellen and Mary, her lifelong friends, very good friends, Ellen commented on “Charlotte has a lack of appetite and a reluctance to eat meat,” which is probably, I’m going to guess, to do with her overall health issues. 

Lana: Yeah. I mean, she probably survived typhus; she probably survived some really awful things at that school. She’s probably never had a lot of meat, so it’s really hard to start eating meat when you haven’t had a lot of it. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, because when I said her dad’s diet growing up was, like, porridge and potatoes, I feel like that’s all he knew, so I don’t know if he was offering them anything different from that. 

Lana: He probably would have if he had a lot of money, but meat is expensive. 

Ann: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they’re not growing up on a farm, like, there’s not animals around. Charlotte also had very poor eyesight, so she was unable to join in ballgames or learn to play from sheet music, which makes me sad that no one got her glasses, but she’s poor. 

Anyway, so she’s 15 years old, she went off to Roe Head. Basically, she’s sent to this boarding school to learn how to be a teacher. So, she spent a year at the school, and then after that year, she went back to be a teacher to her siblings, that is why she was sent there. But she made friends, so it’s good that she was sent there. And it did show her and her family that at least one of them can survive… 

Lana: Interact with human society. 

Ann: Yeah. It’s okay sometimes to leave the house. 

Lana: Sometimes. 

Ann: So, she went back to be the teacher to Emily and to Anne. And then, in 1835, she’s just kind of like… Okay, we’ve talked on the podcast before about, in this era, what jobs are there for women to do? Like, if you’re not going to marry a husband and that gives you a house and a place to live, you need to make money for yourself. So it’s like, you can be a governess, or you can be a domestic servant, or you can be like a seamstress. And so, she’s just like, “Teaching is the career I will turn to,” because it doesn’t look like these girls are going to find wealthy husbands, nor do they seem to be interested in that. So, she’s just becoming a teacher. She teaches her sisters, and I guess when they’ve learned enough, she goes back to Roe Head School as a teacher. So, let me just see. She was 15… She’s 19 years old, she returns to Roe Head school to be a teacher. Although, I want to mention as well, she hates teaching. [laughs] This is not her life’s passion.

Lana: This is not her passion. 

Ann: There’s quotes of her just being like, “Teaching the classes always gets in the way of me doing my writing I want to do. These kids are all annoying.” She doesn’t like it, but it’s just kind of like, what other job is there? 

Emily. Okay, so let’s talk about Emily Brontë. When I first started researching them, I messaged Lana, and I was like, “Lana, how do you tell the Brontës apart? Which is which?” But as I researched them, I was just like, okay, Charlotte is big sister Brontë; she has that sort of responsible kind of energy. 

Lana: She’s going to keep them all alive if she possibly can. 

Ann: Anne is the youngest; she didn’t go to trauma boarding school, she was a little infant when her mother died. Like, she’s the least traumatized by life events just by virtue of her age. So, she’s a bit more, I’m going to say, boring. In the sense of she’s, like, the most capable to function in society. And Emily, the word that I keep thinking is just like, feral. She’s just like a feral cat, but person. She is… Emily is like… [laughs] I don’t know, she’s like a spirit of the moors. 

Lana: She has zero interest in integrating with human society. 

Ann: She loves dogs. There are some really cute pictures that she drew of her very cute dogs, who she loved very much. So, if Charlotte sort of took on the trauma and it became sort of maybe like she had health concerns that are exacerbated, maybe by psychological stuff, and she sort of turned inward with it, Emily just, through the trauma, became like a wild beast. 

Lana: The word that they like to use is “free spirit,” too. She doesn’t care about humans. 

Ann: Free spirit sounds a lot more chill than Emily. 

Lana: Yeah. If anybody can turn into a wild animal and roam the moors for the rest of life, it would be Emily. Like, Emily didn’t want to be a person anymore. And so, she just didn’t. 

Ann: And the thing about Emily that I want to point out, this week of the movie of Wuthering Heights coming out, is Emily is the one who wrote Wuthering Heights. So, anyone who is like, “What the fuck is this story?” It was written by her. It was written by her, and she didn’t— When we get to the part where they start publishing books, Emily is like, “No, I write things for myself. No one else is meant to read them.” And they’re like, “Emily, girl, we need money. You have to publish your book.” So, she wrote this book for herself, and it’s fucking bananas. And this is who she is. I picture her just kind of like, hair matted. It’s just like, “Where’s Emily? Oh, I don’t know, she’s just been living in a burrow for six months. She’s just, like, gnawing on tree bark.” Like, Emily is just… That’s Emily. 

Lana: Yeah. She wants to be a wild thing that lives in the forest, and she can’t, so she just makes them up. 

Ann: Everything I just said, so imagine Charlotte returns to Roe Head School to be a teacher, accompanied by Emily, who is a pupil at this boarding school. Emily’s tuition is being financed by Charlotte’s teaching. Picture everything we just said… Emily attending school. [laughs softly]

Lana: Classes with probably reasonably well-bred young women. 

Ann: And she just comes in and she’s just like… [laughs]

Lana: Did she bite any of them? All I want to know is if she bit any of them. [laughs]

Ann: Emily is speaking in crow language today. 

Lana: Emily’s in the back explaining about, like, random children her father brought home one day. It’s like “Dad never brought any children home.” It’s like, “Oh, did he?”

Ann: And then she’s like, “Oh, in the Glass World Confederacy, but I have my schism, and this is my new…” 

Lana: Starts picking a fight with Charlotte about an imaginary place, like, all of this. 

Ann: I’m going to read a very politely-phrased sentence. “Emily was unable to adapt to life at school.” [chuckles]

Lana: Weird. [laughs] She seems so up for it. 

Ann: So, she left and then Anne took her place there. 

And I just mentioned Anne. My name is Ann, her name is Anne; we’re both the youngest siblings. Anne Brontë’s books are not as famous as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. They’re well regarded, but they don’t really have that weird spark that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have. 

Lana: They don’t take as many risks because she liked to be part of society. 

Ann: Yeah, this is because Anne was capable of functioning in the world, and that meant that the books she wrote were less deranged. So, Anne is like, if we’ve got feral creature Emily, and we’ve got kind of Charlotte with her, like, big anxiety and big sister energy, Anne is fine. Anne is just a functioning person in the world. 

Lana: She’s creative; she didn’t write a terrible book. She just didn’t have that weird genius spark that her sisters had because they took risks. 

Ann: Yeah. And her sisters took risks because they had lived through a lot of shit and just kind of gave no fucks. But Anne gave fucks. 

Lana: And somebody had to because Branwell wasn’t going to do it. 

Ann: Exactly. So, here’s a nice description. “Anne was hardworking and determined to acquire the education she would need to support herself.” So, Emily is just kind of not really thinking about anything other than living in the moment, but Anne was just kind of like… She could look at the family and be like, “Our dad’s not going to live forever. Branwell obviously isn’t going to take care of us. I need education so we can get a job so we can have money because we’re three unmarried…” Like, she understood how things work, and as a little sister, I like that little sister energy. Anyway, so whereas Emily was “Unable to adapt to life at school,” Anne was so committed to life at school. She stayed for two years, returned home only during Christmas and summer holidays. No other Brontë was ever away for so long, I don’t think. 

Lana: She didn’t have the same trauma, so it was easy for her not to want to go back because she probably didn’t like it there very much. 

Ann: Exactly, exactly. The Brontë Parsonage, which is the house where they live in, which is now this museum, it was really so much a safe space for Emily and for Charlotte; they kept returning. And in a way, I think can be relatable to a lot of people who have various things. When you’re stressed, you’re like, “I just want to go home and just curl up in my bed.” That’s an understandable reflex, and to them it was like, “I want to never leave this house or talk to anyone in the world, ever.” Like, that was where they went with it. But Anne was like, “I can leave and function.” because she didn’t have this trauma. 

Lana: As a resident shut in, [laughs] it’s like, you don’t have to like your house to know that your house is the safest place to be sometimes. It doesn’t have to be the best place, but it’s a known quantity, and when you have a lot of anxiety and trauma… Like, Emily didn’t want to be in the house; she wanted to be in a burrow adjacent to the house. Charlotte wanted to be at the house, with the doors, and the walls, the windows and everything surrounding her, keeping her safe. Emily wanted to be in the yard that she knew. Anne was like, “I would like to be a person in society.” 

Ann: Exactly. So, it’s like three really different flavours of Brontë is what we’re looking at here. So, Anne is the one who— Although, I will say, Anne became seriously ill with gastritis while she was at school. And this is interesting. 

Lana: Probably eating meat. 

Ann: Probably, honestly. It’s just like, “Something other than potatoes?” Anyway, but the school that she was at was Calvinist. So, a minister was called to see her during her illness, which suggests that it might have been like a faith… Like, she might have been distressed by the Calvinism of the school. [chuckles]

Lana: I mean, obviously, obviously it was anxiety. Like, whatever was wrong with her, she wasn’t actually sick; it must have been anxiety. She prayed it away. 

Ann: So, she was not thriving. And Charlotte, based on the death of her two sisters at school, Charlotte was concerned, and so, she wrote to the father, she’s like, “We need Anne to be sent home. I can’t have another dead sister.” And so, Anne was sent home. 

Lana: Charlotte immediately jumps to “School kills people. [both laugh] I will not have another education-based death on my hands.” 

Ann: I know, which is interesting. She has so much trauma about school, and then she’s just like, “Well, I guess I’ll just go to a school to train to be a teacher and then teach at a school.” It’s like, the one place… [laughs]

Lana: It’s like, “I don’t like it, but I’m going to do it for my family.” 

Ann: Because it’s the only job she can think of. I have… I think it’s I posted it on Instagram, and it’s on Patreon, I have a bingo card for this series, for the Regency Era, which I did early on. If I were to redo it, I would have another square that was like, “Women try to open a school” because that seems to keep happening. “Women become teachers, even though they don’t like it,” because this is happening in so many stories. 

So, the Brontës, it’s like the house has a magnetic pull, and the Brontës just keep coming back to the house. Like, they can never go too far away for too long. 

Lana: House is safe. House is good. 

Ann: Now, I don’t know how this came to be, but somehow in 1838, Emily got a job as a teacher. 

Lana: Somebody probably came across her in the Moors and thought she was a wise hermit, because this is the era of the ornamental hermits. 

Ann: I don’t know, they just saw her out there, just like, digging in the ground, and they’re like, “You!”

Lana: “She must know things.” 

Ann: So, she got a teacher at Law Hill School in the Yorkshire town of Halifax. How did it say, like, she did not thrive. [Lana giggles] She suffered under the stress of the 17-hour workday. 

Lana: I mean, yes, that is also part of why I am now a shut-in. So, I understand that. 

Ann: No, I think a 17-hour workday would take it out of even, you know what? Anne Brontë, I think, would struggle under that. Emily also hated the pupils, she thought they were all assholes. 

Lana: Well, they were human. 

Ann: They kept coming up and asking her questions. 

Lana: “Why do you want to know things?” 

Ann: “Stop bothering me!” She preferred the company of the dog. [laughs]

Lana: I mean, who doesn’t? 

Ann: Yeah, she’s just like, “Why do you keep disturbing me? I just want to hang out with the dog.” It’s like, “Emily, you’re the teacher.” 

Lana: They’re paying you to be here. [laughs] 

Ann: Anyway, so she became a teacher in 1838. In April 1839, she came back to Brontë Parsonage. So, less than a year. 

Lana: She tried. 

Ann: You know what? She did the best she could, but Emily’s going to Emily. 

Lana: I feel like… this woman wrote a romance. [laughs] I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Not that kind of romance, people! 

Ann: We will talk about this later when we’re doing our Jane Eyre discussion on Patreon, but I like books, movies, TV shows, I like things where lots of weird shit is happening. That’s Anne core. And when I read Wuthering Heights, I was just like, “This book is amazing!” [laughs]

Lana: I love Wuthering Heights. I just know what it is. This is a soap opera. None of these people like each other. 

Ann: Everyone is terrible, fucked up things keep happening. So, the fact that it’s being, Wuthering Heights, this week that you’re listening to this podcast, people, it’s like the movie, it’s like the great love story of our time. It’s like, bitch, what?! 

Lana: Do you need therapy? 

Ann: It is a fucked-up book. Like, one-eighth of it is two people quasi in a love story, sort of, and then death happened. 

Lana: Fifty percent of it is a random guy laying in a bed listening to an old lady talk at him!

Ann: Yeah, like this is… Anyway. So, the fact that anyone thinks that it’s a love story is bananas. And also, it’s like, this is who wrote it. Of course, it’s this fucked up! All she does is live in her head, burrow in the ground. Like, she’s not… 

Lana: She does not have experience with romance. She has experience with the Byronic ideal of romance, and as we all know, that is not romance either! [laughs] That is sex at best. 

Ann: That is where, like, myself as a person, like, I like books and things where fucked up stuff happens, I also like murder mysteries. I don’t tend to read a romance novel; that’s not my vibe. I read Wuthering Heights, and I was like, “This book fucks! I like this book.” So, I like it, and that’s how you know it’s not a romance. 

Lana: I am a romance girlie. I am a dark romance girlie, and thus Jane Eyre. 

Ann: Yeah. Several of the Brontë sisters’ books, including Anne’s books, have people who go off to be governesses and fucked up things happen. So, like, we’re just seeing the life experience occur to give them that experience. 

Lana: Also, religious people are a pain in the ass. That is kind of her vibe. 

Ann: Okay, so now we’re in 1839. So, remember, Charlotte has her friends, there’s Ellen, [chuckles] not to be confused with Helen from Jane Eyre. Ellen’s brother proposed marriage to her, and she declined. So, they’re not… I feel like she declined because she’s like, “Would that mean I would have to leave my house? In which case, no.” 

Lana: I do wonder if she wanted a great romance and just never got one. Like, she liked the idea of romance, but she had a very firm idea in her head of what that would be like, and a practical marriage is not going to be it. 

Ann: Exactly. This would be a transactional thing. So, I could see this would be a way like, “Oh, maybe this way, I could have…” We’ve seen other people in history who are like, “Okay, this will be a way that I can get money and help my family.” Like, sometimes people do these transactional marriages because of those reasons. But that’s not her vibe, that’s not what she’s into. Although I will say, potentially, this is part of why she declined. Later that same year, she wrote a piece called Farewell to Angria. So, Angria was her part of the schism of the Confederacy… 

Lana: She grew out of her fandom. 

Ann: She did. So, she wrote this piece that was about her growing dependency on the fantasy world, fearing for her sanity. With the sense she was losing grip on reality, she made the decision to set aside her fantasy world. 

Lana: So instead, she wrote Jane Eyre. 

Ann: We’ll get into the circumstances of that in a bit. [Lana laughs] 

So, she’s like, “Okay, I can’t live in this fantasy world anymore. I’m going to…” The difference between Charlotte and Anne is Anne is kind of like, again, without the same experience of trauma, Anne is just kind of like, “I’m going to get an education, I’m going to get a job.” And Charlotte’s like, “I’m going to get an education and a job,” but she just, like, can’t make it work because she has so much trauma. Anyway, so she gets a job. But also, Charlotte, importantly, hates teaching, hates children. So, she gets a job as a governess, and guess what? She hates it. [laughs] Because she hates children, she hates teaching, she hates being away from home. [laughs]

Lana: She hates having to work. 

Ann: Yeah. What the quote, what this says here is that “She felt like that her employees treated her like a servant.” 

Lana: Because she was. 

Ann: Yeah. But I feel like that’s a bit… Isn’t Jane Eyre kind of a… She’s hired to take care of the little French girl, right? 

Lana: Yeah, she’s hired as a governess. Doesn’t stay that way, but I mean… She does, but very, very little time in the story is spent on her actually engaging with the child she is meant to be all but raising. 

Ann: Okay. So, then she just kind of bounced from job to job, just being governess for various different places. She’s working for this family called the Sidgwick family as a governess to their son, John, who once threw a Bible at her, “an incident that may have inspired the section of Jane Eyre in which a person called John throws a book at Jane Eyre.” 

Lana: That’s her cousin. But, you know, whatever, you write what you got. 

Ann: It’s like, “Well, one time someone threw a book at me, so I know what it’s like to have a book thrown at you. So, I’m going to put that in my book as well.” 

Lana: “I’m going to write a spoiled child, and it’s going to be you, John. And when you read it, you’ll know.” [giggles]

Ann: So, Charlotte, again, I think this was Elizabeth Gaskell later was going around talking to people like “What was Charlotte like?” So, the Sidgwick family were like, “Charlotte was the worst governess we ever had.” She often went to bed all day, leaving the heavily pregnant Mrs. Sidgwick to look after the children, where it’s like, “Charlotte, you had one job, which was to look after the children, and you are in bed all day,” because you have, like, illness and… Anyway, she was not suited for this job, obviously. Anyway, she got another job as another governess, another family. She hated it. [laughs] Charlotte… 

Lana: If only she had another skill that she could eventually fall back on. 

Ann: Yeah, no, exactly. So, Charlotte is out there trying to get… She’s trying to get work to support the family, which is like, what needs to happen. 

Lana: She knows she has to do it. She doesn’t have to like it, though. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, she doesn’t like it. But also, to the extent that she just, like,  can’t make herself do something she doesn’t like. Whereas Anne – I don’t know, I think my bias is coming out, but I do like a youngest sister called Anne – Anne is just like, again, like she’s not carrying the same trauma with her, but Anne can actually function in the world. Thank god there’s someone like this in this family because she gets that they need income, like, quite a bit. So, she knew she had to earn a living. The father had no private income. When he died, the parsonage would revert to the church, so they wouldn’t even still be able to live there. I think they all knew this, but Anne was the one who was able to actually function in the world. I think she probably looked at Charlotte and Emily, and she’s like, “It’s up to me.” [laughs] Branwell is still there. By this point, I think he’s just a drunken ne’er-do-well. 

Lana: And there he stays. 

Ann: He was a nice brother friend for them in the Glass Confederacy era, and then he became an adult, and just, he’s bringing nothing to the table. Anyway, so she, Anne, was like, “Okay, I’m going to go be a governess.” Again, near Mirfield, shout-out to Mirfield. So, she tried being a governess; the children were assholes, but the parents were like, “No, we’re raising them free range, so you can never punish them.” And eventually, she’s just like, “Fuck this,” and so it didn’t work out. Like a magnet, she returns back to home, with the family, but her unhappy time with this family is believed to be the inspiration behind her novel, Agnes Grey, for anyone who knows her novel, Agnes Grey. 

Anne returns to Haworth, she forms a friendship with— So, her father has a new curate who’s, like, a hot, young hunk whose name is William Weightman. He was 25, I think she’s a bit younger than that, probably like 19 or so by now. He was handsome, he was friendly, he had a flirtatious personality. I love this detail: “Upon learning that none of the Brontë sisters had ever received a Valentine’s card, he wrote cards and poems to each of them.” So, this could have turned into something nice until he died of cholera. 

Lana: I mean, when in doubt, just kill them from something. 

Ann: Yeah, you know, I’m surprised like the tuberculosis hasn’t… It’s going to show up, but we’ve had typhus, we’ve had cancer, now cholera. Anyway, so Anne takes another governess position. She is determined to make a success of this, to become well-liked. And actually, the girls who she was watching over became her lifelong friends. I do like this as a little detail about Anne; she developed an interest in geology. She liked to collect semi-precious stones (she has that in common with Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire). And in her novel, she includes discussion of semi-precious stones, [both giggle] because that is her hyperfixation. She’s just like, “This is a nice hobby anyone could do, men or women. Collecting stones.” 

Okay, so I’ll tell you what happens, and you can probably guess how it’s going to go. So, 1842, Charlotte travelled with Emily to Brussels to a boarding school run by Constantin Heger and his wife, Claire. Both siblings were student teachers, so Charlotte taught English and Emily eventually taught music in return for board and lodging. I picture Emily teaching sort of like, interpretive dance, like teaching music, playing music, and she just dances to it. 

Lana: And she just picks up an instrument and starts making noises with it. 

Ann: And just kind of like scream-singing, sort of like Yoko Ono. 

Lana: Very “O Captain! My Captain!” 

Ann: Anyway, so one of the reasons why they went there to do this was they wanted to attain some skills so that they could open a school of their own at the house. 

Lana: At their house.

Ann: Yes! 

Lana: Solving all their problems. 

Ann: Mm-hm. So, I mean, if this was on your bingo card, you’d mark off like, “Women decide to open a school.” Yep, that happens in every episode this season. So, they’re learning skills about how to run a school. Charlotte enjoyed her time there partially because she had a close relationship with Constantin Heger; some people suspect she might have been in love with him. But it’s the same sort of thing where, like, the letters that everyone writes to everyone are always so passionate, it’s like how do you tell people who are in love from just people who just really like a person? 

Anyway. So, things seem to be— I’m shocked that Emily is in Brussels, a foreign country. I guess she found places to, like, run around and climb trees, so she’s doing fine, I guess. But then they were called back to the parsonage. It’s like the hell mouth you can never escape. [laughs]

Lana: What part of Glass Town was hers? Because she might like Belgium because of the whole Napoleon thing. Like, she might be able to fanfic her way out of that one. 

Ann: Oh, that’s true, just like, imagine that she’s living in Glass Town. Anyway, so their Aunt Elizabeth, the one who had helped raise them, died, and so they were brought back. Now, I don’t have how she died, but I’m going to guess tuberculosis because this disease starts spreading around this house that they all live in. So, Elizabeth is dead. Charlotte, she was so traumatized by her mother dying, her sisters dying, like, this just really triggers her. And then also, this was around the same time that hunk William Weightman died of cholera, and then also Charlotte’s friend, Mary Taylor’s sister, Martha, died of cholera. It’s just a lot of death for one person to handle, who’s already only sort of barely hanging on in general. 

So, they went back. Emily stayed, but Charlotte returned to Brussels to take up a teaching post at the school. This was the first time she’d ever travelled alone. She found the experience, “alarming.” Her novel, Villette, I guess, has a similar situation. So, I don’t know, I think she did okay in Brussels, and maybe Emily did too, because they were together, but now that she’s by herself, she’s struggling a bit more, she’s feeling homesick. Her attachment to Constantin is… Anyway, so she became jealous of Constantin’s wife. Things are just getting intense, and so she inevitably returns to the Brontë Parsonage. But her time there with those people inspired, as I mentioned, her novel, Villette, but also she has a novel called The Professor, and I think Constantin is the model for the character in The Professor. 

And then, she’s like, “Okay. Okay, girls. Okay, Brontës, let’s open our boarding school.” It was advertised as “The Mrs. Brontës establishment for the board and education of a limited number of young ladies.” But no one really wanted to go because it was in the middle of the Yorkshire moors. 

Lana: And they didn’t have any connections because everywhere that they taught, they made enemies. 

Ann: Yeah. So, they did not attract any pupils, and the project was abandoned. So, Anne is just like, “Okay, I will single-handedly keep this family afloat. I’m the only person capable of functioning in the world. I will do this, I’m Anne.” So, she went back to where she’d been a governess, and she pulled her strings because, you know, she got along with the girls, she got that family, and she got a position for Branwell to tutor the son of the family. 

Lana: Because that’s what you want: Branwell around children. 

Ann: Oh, what you don’t want is Branwell around the wife of the household who he started having an affair with. 

Lana: Very normal Brontë behaviour. 

Ann: Yeah. So, Branwell was, guess what? Fired. And just, due to kind of all… 

Lana: Because he didn’t even do it well, he got caught. 

Ann: No, he had an affair with the wife, it became apparent, he was fired, and then Anne just resigned because she’s like, “I can’t.” [laughs]

Lana: “Can one of you be normal, please? Just one of you.” 

Ann: So, I love this story. They’re just like the parsonage; the dad is still there, by the way, like being the curate and whatever, but getting older, and they know that, like, none of them have any money or jobs. 

So, 1844. Emily likes writing, like they all do, and so she went through all the poems she’d written, and she was just, as a little project for herself, she was just copying them into a new notebook so they were all in one book together. And then, Charlotte discovered these notebooks, and she was just like, “Oh my god, you write poems? I write poems! Let’s publish them and make money!” Emily was understandably furious at this invasion of her privacy, because it’s her private thoughts and whatever. I understand that. Anyway, she’s like, “No, I only write for myself. I don’t want to publish these.” But then Anne came out, and she’s like, “Oh my God, what? I also write poems!” [laughs] They secretly had all been writing poems and not telling each other. [laughs] 

Lana: I mean, after the schism, I can understand why they were keeping it apart. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. So now, like together again, so they’re like, “Wait a minute, we all write poems.” And so, they’re like, “Well, what if we write poems?” And Emily’s like, “No, I don’t want people to know about me. I’m a private hermit weirdo.” And they’re like, “Okay. Well, what if we publish them, but we won’t use our names?” And so, that’s where they each came up with sort of gender-neutral pseudonyms, but the same first letter as their names; Charlotte became Currer Bell, Emily became Ellis Bell, and Anne became Acton Bell. So, they published this book called Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. So, it’s like, “We’re three men who write poems, and we’re siblings.” Emily and Anne were insistent that they didn’t want people to know it was them, Charlotte was less worried about that. 

But the thing is, they’re like, “Yeah, let’s publish our poems!” But this is how this worked. It’s just like “We’re three random weird hermit sisters in the moors.” No publisher was like, “Great, we’ll pay you to do this,” so they themselves had to pay to have it published. 

Lana: Because they had no platform. 

Ann: Yeah, much like authors today struggle to get books sold. So, not really self-published, they paid a company to publish it for them. 

Lana: They couldn’t start a podcast to start a long con to get a book published, like Ann did. 

Ann: Not everybody has that option. 

Lana: I would have paid so much money to listen to their podcast. 

Ann: I think, I’m going to say, Anne Brontë could probably have figured it out. 

Lana: Anne Brontë would have been the producer. Emily, she would have clipped a lavalier onto Emily and just recorded her mad ravings, and then she’d asked Charlotte questions, and Charlotte would have just given her, like, one-word responses, but then got really mad and explained a whole podcast worth of things. And it would have been chaos, and I love that idea. 

Ann: I like the concept of just putting a microphone on Emily and just her talking out loud to herself as she wanders the moors. Or Emily could be like, “Let’s go walk with Emily.” If you go to the Brontë Parsonage, you can see there’s like, the walking… It’s like, “Here’s where Emily liked to walk.” You can see where she went, so I could see doing a vlog. It would have to be Anne secretly filming Emily. [laughs]

Lana: [laughs] Exactly. 

Ann: See where she goes and stuff. 

Anyway, so they published this book of poetry. Two copies were sold because no one knew who they were! It’s like, “Oh, here’s a book of poems by three random men.” 

Lana: Which is why you don’t write a memoir when no one knows who you are. 

Ann: Yeah. So, you know, this plan to make money for their family, not doing well so far. Anyway, their father had various health issues as I mentioned, but one of them, as a lot of older people have, he got cataracts, which is an eye thing. 

Lana: Everybody gets cataracts eventually. That’s what my eye doctor is telling me. 

Ann: Yeah. No, my mother has had cataract surgery and, like, every single person she knows is like, “Oh, when I had my cataract surgery…” Like, it’s just this happens if you live long enough. 

Lana: Yeah. Eventually, your lens gets cloudy. 

Ann: But in Regency era, there was not… The same as when they did cataract surgery in ancient Egypt, basically, it’s just kind of like, “Okay, we’re just going to put these pokey things in your eyeballs,” and then they couldn’t do stitches or anything, so the way that you recovered from cataract surgery was you just had to be in a dark room for, like, a month and just not see light while your eye slowly healed. And that was when Charlotte was like, “I’m going to write Jane Eyre.” 

Lana: “It is time.” 

Ann: While her father was recuperating in a dark room and she was helping take care of him, she was like, “I’m going to pivot to fiction, and the book I’m going to write is going to involve a blind man.” 

Lana: I mean, he eventually becomes blind, and it’s not because, you know, natural aging… because chaos. 

Ann: On the Patreon podcast, we’ll talk about that. But I do like that Charlotte, you know, we’ve seen how she’s struggling to make these jobs work to do stuff, but when she’s just kind of forced for one month to just care for her father, and her regular routines have been disrupted, she’s like, “Well, I will take this month…” It’s like, I don’t know, like me, over the Christmas holiday, I was like, “Huh, like I’m done my book, it hasn’t come out, I’m caught up on the podcast. What am I going to do? Oh! I’m going to take up knitting.” It’s just sort of like, when you have a finite period of time, it’s like, “I’ll try something different.” Actually, but her first novel that she finished was The Professor, and so Charlotte was like, “Okay, maybe we’ll make more money publishing fiction than publishing a random book of poetry set in our random fantasy realm.” 

Lana: When fantasy wasn’t really a thing yet. 

Ann: Yeah. So, her novel, The Professor, she was like, “Okay, let’s each submit…” It’s funny that they’re like, “Let’s publish a book of poetry that all of us did.” Then she’s like, “I’m writing fiction now. You two write novels also, then we’ll submit all three.” The family is so just, like, codependent. 

Lana: “We’re doing this together!” 

Ann: “Here’s what’s happening: we’re all novelists now.” 

Lana: “I’ve decided to be a novelist, which means you’re writing a book.” 

Ann: “Which means we are all now novelists.” And Branwell is like, “Me too!” 

Lana: “No, not you.” 

Ann: Branwell, are you still in the story? He is! 

Lana: Branwell, go drink something. 

Ann: But as much as Anne Brontë’s books don’t have that spark of Charlotte and Emily, like, Branwell’s writing is just like, “Good job. Nice try. Here’s a gold star, Branwell. You put sentences together.” 

Lana: You know what words are. 

Ann: Anyway, so in this kind of like, codependent style, the three of them wrote their novels. So, Charlotte wrote The Professor, Anne wrote Agnes Grey, and Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. 

Lana: Straight off the bat, just, if “I have to write one book, it’s going to be this one. It’s going to piss people off for the rest of history.” [giggles]

Ann: The format of it is going to be like, “Oh, is this the main character of the book? Yes… until she dies, very early on.” Then… [laughs]

Lana: It’s also a frame story somehow, like, she went deep into all of the devices. 

Ann: If you’re going to write one book, like, she put everything in it that you could put into a book. So, they all wrote their books, and then Charlotte submitted them all together to the London publisher, Henry Colburn, being like, “Dear sir, here are three—“ [laughs] and imagine how big these are! They didn’t have typewriters! Like, Wuthering Heights, handwritten, like, “Here’s three gigantic stacks of paper.” 

This is the letter she wrote with them, because Henry Colburn was like, “What is this giant parcel?” She was like “Three tales, each occupying a volume and capable of being published together or separately as thought most advisable.” And she was like, “And just so you know, we’ve previously been published. Poetry, that we paid for, that two people bought.” And so these were sent as like, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, like, “Hello, we are three men and here are our novels.” And here’s the kicker. So, Charlotte is behind all of this; she’s the one who wrote The Professor, and the publisher was like, “You know what? I like Wuthering Heights. I like Agnes Grey. Don’t like The Professor.” 

Lana: So, like, “Fine, I’ll write the greatest novel ever written.” 

Ann: She’s like, “Okay, fine. I’ll write Jane Eyre.” And I think this is when the cataract surgery was happening. Anyway, so actually, I like this fuck you energy because this publisher was like, “Okay, I like these two, but not this one.” And Charlotte’s like, “Really? Okay, I’ll write the greatest novel ever written, and I’ll send it to your rival publisher.” Which she did. 

Lana: [giggles] Which is the correct way of publishing. 

Ann: Yeah. So, she sent Jane Eyre to Smith, Elder & Co., and it was published six weeks later. Those six weeks were just spent typing, apparently. 

Lana: Dang! Put it on the press. 

Ann: So, Jane Eyre comes out, and we’ll talk about this – again, listeners join my Patreon if you want to hear us go deep on a discussion of Jane Eyre – but one of the things is that it’s first person and that was really unusual for books. So many books right now are written like, you know, “I, Jane Eyre, walked down the street,” whatever, like, but usually it’s like “A young woman called Jane walked down the street,” like, that’s how most books were. But hers was like, “I’m Jane Eyre and here’s my story.” Like, that was shocking. 

Lana: And Wuthering Heights was told… A person telling a random person the story of people that he doesn’t even know, and then Jane Eyre comes along, it’s like, “This is my trauma. You must listen to all of it.” 

Ann: And I think it’s interesting because the Brontës, myself, until recently, I couldn’t remember which Brontë wrote which thing. But I think it’s a common thing for people to like Jane Eyre or to like Wuthering Heights and be like, “Oh, what else did this author write?” And you go to the other books to read them, you’re like, “Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are the same person?” If you’re expecting the same thing in both, you’re not going to get it. Like, you respect these books in different ways, but if someone expects it to be similar, like, they are not. 

Lana: Because they hear “Brontë,” it must be the same. It’s like, no. Very different energy. 

Ann: But this is part of their branding, because it’s like, it’s interesting that it’s three siblings who are all well-known authors now. But it’s like, yeah, that’s because they did everything together. Like, they wrote novels at the same time, they submitted them at the same time, like, they’ve never been… It’s not like one of them wrote a book— It’s like Hilary Duff was on Disney Channel and Haylie Duff showed up, one of them paved the way. It’s like the three of them are like, “We are three. We are all novelists.” 

Lana: “I’m writing a book. You’re writing a book. This is how it works.” 

Ann: But that’s where people think of them, like even this podcast episode, it’s like “The Brontës,” because they’re a collective. I could never do an episode just about one of them because they’re not distinct people, you know? They’re so codependent. 

Lana: Well, and they’re basically shut-ins. Like, there’s not a… And once again, you brought me onto an episode where the scores are going to be low, but the story is going to be high quality. 

Ann: Yeah. When we get to the Scan— I haven’t thought it through, but like, I do think they have Significance. 

Lana: Well, yeah. 

Ann: But how much scandal can you get up to when you are a shut-in? 

Lana: I mean, the wolves have very, very firm opinions on Emily. 

Ann: So, Jane Eyre, love this. I love the energy of this. She wrote Jane Eyre as a fuck you to the first publisher, partially. She sent it to the new publisher, who was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing. We’re going to publish it six weeks from now,” and it was an immediate success. Like, the guy read it, and he was just like, “Fuck yes, this book is great.” And it received favourable reviews. And then, when this came out by the other publisher was like, “Oh shit, what? A Brontë book came out? Well, I have these other two!“ So, then he published the other two. And the publisher of Wuthering Heights and Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë put on them, like, saying like, “These authors are related to Currer Bell, the author of Jane Eyre, this bestseller.” Jane Eyre sold the best of all; Wuthering Heights did very well because it’s so dramatic. Agnes Grey is currently the least famous of these books, but also… It sold okay, but Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were the ones that everyone’s like, “Holy shit, read these books!” 

Lana: And that’s in their lifetimes. After their lifetimes, it’s hard to tell who’s the most famous. They rise and fall based on trends, but they don’t go away. 

Ann: Yeah. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights came out, and they were bestsellers. It’s kind of like Frankenstein; it’s like, it comes out, and it’s never out of print, and it’s never not popular. People have always heard of it. Like, it’s just like, “Oh, hi, I just read this book, and it’s a classic, and it will always be.” 

Lana: I mean, even now, TikTok is having massive fights about what Wuthering Heights is really about and what kind of story it’s telling, and that says so much about the kind of stories that we’re dealing with here. Like, people have firm opinions in a year where a lot is going on, and they have to take the time out to go, “No, you’re wrong about Wuthering Heights.” I am one of those people that can do that. [giggles] 

Ann: And that is why you’re on this podcast, because I needed someone with this Brontë knowledge. But like, these books were so popular when they first came out. I wanted to just clarify… So, Agnes Grey was the first book that Anne wrote. The books did well, and so the Brontës were like, “Amazing, let’s write more novels and make more money.” So, then Anne wrote a second novel… 

Lana: And never teach another child again. 

Ann: Thank god. Like, you know, good for them and good for the children who don’t have to be traumatized by them as teachers. 

Lana: The real service to humanity. 

Ann: So, these books are coming out, like, the Bell brothers’ books, you know, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall comes out. And there starts being rumours that this is all one person, like, there’s not three Bell Brothers, it’s just one person. And so, at one point, Anne and Charlotte went to London, Emily obviously didn’t go [chuckles] because she doesn’t… You know, Emily was running in the field somewhere and couldn’t be found. 

Lana: Because they needed to talk to their publisher, and their publisher needed to respect them as people. 

Ann: Yeah, Emily didn’t come because, like, that’s just better for the situation. But they went to the publisher to be like, “It’s not one person. The Bell brothers are various people.” And the increasing popularity of these books by the Bell brothers led to new interest in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. So, that publisher was like, “Oh! I have these poems, I’m going to republish them.” But guess what? It’s still sold poorly. Like, their poems… You know, Brontë stans love their poems; they love their childhood stories about the, like, fantastical realm with fake Napoleon in it and stuff, but what people really love about their work are their novels. 

So, Charlotte, she wrote Jane Eyre— Oh, no, she already wrote The Professor, so then she starts her third novel. The Professor has not been published yet; Jane Eyre has been published. The Professor was refused by that other publisher, and now she’s writing a new novel called Shirley, but the writing process is… A couple of things happen, tuberculosis-related. 

Lana: The tuberculosis begins. 

Ann: So, in September 1848, Branwell died, probably of tuberculosis, following a long descent into alcoholism and drug addiction. 

Lana: I mean, it could be syphilis, we don’t know. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, I think ultimately he died of tuberculosis, and he probably also had other things going on. So, he died, and then the funeral was a week later. At the funeral, Emily caught a severe cold that developed into an inflammation of the lungs and accelerated her preexisting tuberculosis. 

Lana: Because, as we know from watching Vulgarpiece Theatre, tuberculosis doesn’t kill you on the initial infection; it just slowly eats your lungs over the years. 

Ann: Actually, can we just have a tuberculosis moment? So, if we could just explain. For instance, tuberculosis, when I think of tuberculosis, which AKA consumption, I think of, like, in the movie Moulin Rouge, Nicole Kidman’s character, every now and then, she coughs blood into a handkerchief, but she seems fine, and then she suddenly has— Like, you can have tuberculosis for years, and it just kind of flares? Like, goes up and down? 

Lana: Okay, tuberculosis is a single infection. It’s a single infection that scars your lungs so horribly that they slowly wither away and die. Without lungs, you cannot live. So basically, the scar tissue just starts to eat up all your lungs. So, your lungs are inflatable, obviously, that’s the whole point of them, and they have these little tiny lobes, these little tiny bubbles in them. The bubbles are where the oxygen goes into your bloodstream. So, the two ways that your lungs withering away kills you is that it’s hard for the lungs to expand and close, and those little lobules just get cut off to the point where you no longer have lobules that convert the oxygen to your bloodstream. 

Ann: So, like, you have tuberculosis, but people can have it for a really long time because it’s just a slow wasting disease? 

Lana: No, tuberculosis… Tuberculosis is like a cold. You get it, and then it dies, and then you’re no longer sick, but you have already hurt your lungs, and because of the scar tissue on your lungs, that scar tissue, like, it’s the scarification slowly, over time expands. So, it’s not that you have a disease anymore, it’s that your lungs are broken and like it starts taking on water, it starts doing all of these things where your lungs no longer work well. So, when they say consumption, they mean, like, it’s literally consuming your lungs over time, and it’s not the disease, it’s the aftereffects of the disease. 

Ann: Long tuberculosis. 

Lana: Yeah. So, it’s no longer like a virus or a bacterial infection. Now, it’s just your lungs are slowly dying. 

Ann: So, people with tuberculosis, like in the movie Tombstone, where Doc Holliday goes to like a hot, dry place because that’s good for his tuberculosis, or people in England would go to, I don’t know, Spain or Greece or something. It’s like, go to a hot, dry place, that’s good for your tuberculosis. That’s just because it’s easier to breathe. 

Lana: It’s good for your lungs. It’s good for what remains of your lungs so that they’re supported; it’s not too wet, you’re not likely to get another infection because, like, a chest cold is terrible when your lungs are slowly dying. 

Ann: That’s the thing. So, Emily got a cold at the funeral, which exacerbated her tuberculosis. So, can you think of a worse place to be with tuberculosis than in the Yorkshire moors, drinking cemetery water? 

Lana: Yeah. [laughs] There aren’t a whole lot… There aren’t a whole lot of worse places than anywhere in England with tuberculosis, and then you add the Yorkshire moors with the cemetery water and probably not enough protein. Probably not enough anything. 

Ann: Well, knowing that, you know, hot, dry climates are good for the lungs, and sort of like this damp, cold where they live and where they’re compelled to always return to is just going to… That’s not great for people who have tuberculosis. 

Lana: What was good for her was the amount of exercise she was getting, like, the wandering of the moors, that’s great. 

Ann: That’s what let her live as long as she did, Emily. Yeah. 

So, Emily, her condition was worsening, and Charlotte was like, “Please let me call you a doctor.” You know, all of Charlotte’s sister dying trauma is popping up because Branwell just died too. But Emily’s just like, “No, I won’t have any doctors. I don’t believe in pharmaceuticals.” Anyway, but as she got closer to death, her final words to Charlotte were, “If you send for a doctor, I will see him now.” But she died. 

Lana: Yeah, there’s not a lot you could do at that point. 

Ann: Yeah. So, Emily had been so weak, and she’d been staying on a sofa in the living room of the parsonage. Her dog, I mentioned, Emily loved her dog, there’s these beautiful pencil drawings she drew of her dog. Her dog was called Keeper, and Keeper was lying with her as she died. And so, Branwell died, and then Emily got sick, and Emily died. And Anne, who up until now has avoided those early childhood traumas, this deeply affects Anne. This is… It deeply affects Charlotte, but this is the first time Anne has faced this much death. 

Lana: Anne finally gets it. 

Ann: Yeah. Anyway, so the grief really affected her physical health, so does just, like, everything. She fell into depression, it affected her health, and then she got influenza, which led to… tuberculosis. 

Lana: Yeah, people underestimate the flu because, like, we live with it a lot now, but when you don’t have Mucinex, and you don’t have, you know, indoor heating… 

Ann: Or just anything to keep your fluids up, or anything… So, she just falls ill and then tuberculosis also. Actually, can I ask you again, tuberculosis corner, how is it transmitted? Is that just like spit from a person with tuberculosis? Is there like, a contagious phase? 

Lana: It’s highly contagious. One of the biggest things about it is that it can also be covert, like, you don’t know that you have it, and you can still be transmitting it. 

Ann: Well, just the fact that all these people in this household all got tuberculosis one after another, I feel like they might have given it to each other. 

Lana: Coughs and sneezes like, it’s a lot like COVID. 

Ann: Yeah. So, if you’re nursing your loved one who is sick and they have tuberculosis, then you could get sick, because there’s no face masks and whatever. 

Lana: There’s not even the germ theory of disease. They don’t know how they’re getting sick, they just know that they are. 

Ann: “Oh, no! Bring out the leeches,” et cetera. So, Anne, you know, she’s grieving, she’s sick. A doctor told her she had little hope of recovery, but she was just like, “Screw that. I’m Anne Brontë.” 

Lana: “I survive.”

Ann: “I, like my sisters, have now experienced trauma, and I will see through it.” So, unlike Emily, Anne took all of the recommended medicines and followed the advice she was given, because that’s the Anne Brontë way. 

Lana: Because other people are maybe trustworthy. [giggles]

Ann: Yeah, no. So, she takes other people’s advice; she’s not just like, “Oh, the crows in the woods told me to run with the wolves.” She’s like, “Medicine? Great. Thank you, expert people.” Anyway, so she got a bit better and decided to visit Scarborough to see if the fresh sea air might be helpful. But she went there, and all her symptoms came back. Like, it became clear that she was also going to die. And then in a very pragmatic Brontë way, she asked Charlotte, like, “Do you want me to come home and die, or would it be okay if I die here in Scarborough?” And the doctor was like, “You’re going to die pretty much right away, so probably you should stay here.” 

So, as she was told she was going to die, she expressed her love and concern for Charlotte and whispered for Charlotte to take courage, and then she died. So, in terms of the Brontës and their deaths, she’s 29, and she’s the youngest one. The other ones are barely… They’re all like under age 35, all these dying Brontës. A lot has happened, but they’re all quite young still. So, Anne died, age 29. The only Brontës left are Charlotte and the dad; Dad still around, Patrick. So, Charlotte turned to her writing as a way to deal with her grief. She finished, remember, she was writing her third book, Shirley, and then all these deaths happened. I don’t know. Have you read Shirley? I imagine… 

Lana: I haven’t. I read the two big ones in seventh grade, and then I just didn’t stop rereading Jane Eyre. [laughs] I found my personality, I embedded upon it, and then I just kept it there. 

Ann: No, fair enough. So, Shirley, I think it’s interesting, she was writing it, and then, like, everyone in her family died, and then she finished writing it. So, I wonder what that book is like. The novel’s reception was not as enthusiastic as that of Jane Eyre. 

So, in terms of my… This reminds me a bit of my personal fandom is Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. And so, Agatha Christie, somewhat famously, had a complete mental breakdown, collapse. She ran off under a fake name, and no one knew where she was. Then she came back, and she worked really hard to rebuild her life and stuff. But her publisher was like, “Bitch, you have a book due.” So, she wrote this book called The Mystery of the Blue Train, I think, and Agatha Christie always said, “This was my least favourite book I ever wrote. I hated that I had to write it. It’s such a bad book, it reminds me of this terrible time in my life.” And from then on, she always wrote one book ahead, so in case something happened, she had a book she could turn in. 

But I wonder if Shirley is like that for Charlotte, where it’s just like, she was going through so much in her life, the book just… She couldn’t put her attention and intensity into that book because she was dealing with so much. And that book has never been as well— At that time, it was not as enthusiastically received, and it doesn’t have the longevity of Villette or Jane Eyre. 

Lana: Yeah, she only has one other book, really, that people look back on. 

Ann: So, Charlotte was her sister’s executor, and this is where the, like, myth of the Brontës kind of starts to develop. At first, it’s like, the three… You know, at this point, no one knew that it was them, it was these Bell brothers. But in various ways, it becomes apparent that, like, it was these people. Partially because the characters were so clearly based on people from around the Brontë Parsonage, people were like, “Wait a minute. [laughs] If one of these books is written by one of the Brontës and they’re all siblings and the letters of the names… Wait a minute! Did the Brontë…?” Anyway. So, eventually, they figure out that Charlotte was the author of these books. 

And then she wrote an explanatory introduction to Wuthering Heights, like the new release of it, to try to make it less shocking to the public. She suppressed the republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall because she thought it was shocking. I’m not sure. But the fact that this wasn’t republished had a negative effect on Anne’s popularity as a novelist because her books kind of weren’t as available as the other ones. This is a controversial decision that she made; I think she’s just trying to sort of control the narrative of themselves and their lives and their work. And it’s kind of like they were the three girls, and now there’s just her. She’s like, “Well, I don’t want to be a novelist if they’re not also novelists.” 

She discreetly revealed herself to her publisher and her friends as the author of Jane Eyre, and so she started to visit London, and she started to meet some other lady writers. This is where she meets Elizabeth Gaskell, another author called Harriet Martineau. And I will mention that Charlotte and Harriet Martineau, they shared an interest in racial relations and the abolitionist movement. So, just so you know, Charlotte is on that side of that issue, the good side. And then, yeah, so Villette was her last novel to be published in her lifetime, which returned to the first-person perspective. 

Lana: And that one was popular. It’s not Jane Eyre popular, but that one is still talked about, and it was… 

Ann: Yeah, I think Shirley is the one that was kind of a miss, but Villette, it’s like, “Oh, she’s back to form.” 

Shortly before the publication of Villette, Charlotte, who I think at this point is in her mid-late thirties, she received a proposal of marriage from the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, an Irishman from County Antrim in her father’s native Ulster. He had been her father’s curate. Remember, there’s another guy, the hunk, who was the curate? So, the father just keeps hiring these like, hunk curates. Anyway, he had been in love with Charlotte for a long time. She initially refused to marry him. Her father objected to the marriage partially because of his poor financial status. But I’d be like, Patrick, like what financial status is Charlotte going to have? 

Lana: There would be no one to take care of him. 

Ann: Mmm, I guess. 

Lana: This man is fundamentally selfish. 

Ann: Patrick Brontë. Anyway, so her friend Elizabeth Gaskell thought that, like, this might be good for Charlotte, to have the structure in her life that a marriage would bring. So, she got friend of a friend to try to help out this guy with his finances. Anyway, eventually, Charlotte accepted his proposal, and they got married. Now, in a real sort of narcissistic parent move, which makes me think of Victoria Beckham, Patrick Brontë had intended to give Charlotte away, but at the last minute decided he could not. 

Lana: Could have been Branwell. 

Ann: This is a real Branwell-type move from Patrick. So, Charlotte had to go to the church without him. Because her father was not there, it was her lifelong friend and former teacher from Roe Head School, Miss Wooler, who gave her away. They went for a honeymoon in Ireland. And you mentioned, like, well, who’s going to take care of the father if she gets married? It’s like, don’t worry, they live in the same house. Charlotte found a way to get married, but not have to leave the only house she could ever live in. So, it’s her, her husband, and her dad all in that house. 

So, she became pregnant soon after her wedding. But I will just mention, like, we know Charlotte is like, she’s small, she’s had all these health problems, and she’s also in her late thirties. Like, nowadays, this would be a high-risk pregnancy. And in the… cemetery water… [laughs]

Lana: In the moors. 

Ann: This is not… You know, things are not going to go well. Spoilers. So, she became pregnant soon after her wedding, her health declined rapidly. And then, she and the unborn child both died March 31st, 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday. So, it’s possible that… One theory, I think she had all these health problems anyway, but her death might have been caused from complications from severe morning sickness, like, just sort of that… 

Lana: The dehydration. 

Ann: Yeah, just the absolute dehydration. It’s like, “Oh, quick! Drink more cemetery water.” Like, that’s not going to help. 

Anyway, so her first novel, The Professor, the one that was that the first publisher didn’t want, was published posthumously. And then, two years after she died, is when Elizabeth Gaskell wrote this biography that’s called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and that’s where the Brontë myth really took off. So, their books are popular in their lifetime, and then this book came out about how interesting they are, and then the books became even more popular, and then they’ve stayed popular. 

And just a bit about the legacy. So, the Brontë Society… So, she died in 1857— Or sorry, 1855. The biography came out in 1857, and then 40 years later, the Brontë Society was founded. Like, that’s how early on there was enough fans of them that, like, they started a society. So, they wanted to promote interest in the Brontë family and their works. 

Lana: Also, a deeply Victorian thing is the society of whatever thing you mildly are interested in. 

Ann: Well, that’s the thing with the Brontës is that, too, in terms of this and the Regency era and stuff, like in terms of the eras themselves, I saw somebody was describing this kind of the Regency era, and then like 1830 to 1840 is kind of like when the Brontës were the books are coming out, and then Queen Victoria, then the Victorians take over. So, the Brontës were kind of in this in-between phase where it’s, like, end of Regency, but just pre-Victorian. So, it’s kind of like an era without a name. This decade is where they fit in. So, yeah. Of course, the Victorians would love them! The Victorians love goth, like overwrought, all the drama. 

Lana: Yeah. Absolute chaos. 

Ann: Well, the Victorians were the ones who got really obsessed with, like, Mary, Queen of Scots and the murder of Rizzio and stuff. Like, they love this shit, the Victorians.

Lana: But not in their society, just in like, people in history and in like, “Oh, well, they’re dead now, so it’s fine.” 

Ann: “Now we can celebrate it.” 

Lana: If it had been happening during the Victorian era, no. No, obviously not. 

Ann: Exactly. So, the parsonage, the Haworth parsonage, where the Brontës— This says, “Where the Brontës grew up,” but I would say like, where the Brontës only ever lived, was bought by Sir James Roberts and gifted to the Brontë Society in 1928, and it opened as the Brontë Parsonage Museum. So, you can go there, you can see so many things; you can see all these drawings that they did, the little books that they made off of pieces of pamphlets. 

I do want to mention, the one famous portrait of the three Brontës sisters, which, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but it’s kind of the only portrait of them anyone ever really uses, and they’re just kind of all looking really intensely out. I didn’t realize, that painting is by Branwell. Originally, it had been the three of them and him, but then for some sort of… I don’t know. You know, we’re laughing about Branwell, but I think he knew he was, like, the bonus Brontë. He painted over himself with a pillar, so it’s, like, the three of them and a pillar in the middle, and that’s where Branwell used to be. So, it’s known as like, the pillar portrait. So, Branwell got it, and I’m glad that he’s not in the picture because I wouldn’t want a picture with Branwell. [laughs] 

Lana: Not pictured, Branwell, thankfully. 

Ann: Yeah, but he was the one who painted it. So, it’s like, that is his one contribution to this whole saga is he made… And because it’s him and he painted them, it’s like, well, he knew what they looked like, and it’s like a fairly representative painting. So, we can kind of imagine what they looked like. 

Lana: He’s not going to sugarcoat what they look like because they’re his sisters. 

Ann: And no one knew them better than him. So, I think you can also, when you have a painting by someone who knows them, it’s not just like, well, this is what their hair colour and their eye colour were, but this is what they’re like. And I think he captures that. So, Branwell, you did one good thing in your life, making that painting. Thank you, Branwell. 

So, what we do at the end of our biographical episodes is we— Well, actually, first, I don’t think there’s any… We do have a special award we can give to people for Outstanding Supporting Performance, but they were just each other’s outstanding supporting… 

Lana: The only other person we have is Branwell, and he did not… [giggles] 

Ann: No. Branwell and the dad? No. Charlotte’s husband, who cares? Like, I don’t think… There are no outsiders in this story. 

Lana: Charlotte’s husband is a cameo at best. 

Ann: Okay, so there are four categories, and each is a scale from 0 to 10. So, the first one is Scandaliciousness. How scandalous were the Brontës in their life? I would say… I would say 1, just because Emily is so fucking weird. [laughs]

Lana: And they even, like, did a good job of hiding how weird she was, like, “Oh, Emily can’t be in society. Well, guess we’re not showing Emily anymore.” [laughs] 

Ann: Yeah, like no one knew. How scandalous can you be if you’re all housebound? [both laugh] There’s no one to be scandalous by. 

Lana: If you don’t have the internet… If you’d given any of these people the Internet, different game. 

Ann: Yeah. But the fact that all they can do is hang out with each other. 

Lana: I’m just imagining the absolute chaos these three would wreak in AO3. 

Ann: Well, I think it’s sort of like how one sees from some homeschooled children and stuff. It’s just like, people who don’t interact with the world in their life, but on the internet, they can do so much stuff. It’s just, yeah, the energy that they would have, the stories they would have. 

Lana: Yeah. Homeschool PKS who have a lot of extra health trauma, like, yeah, that’s what TikTok is made for in some ways. 

Ann: Yeah. Would you agree with a 1 for Scandaliciousness? 

Lana: Oh, absolutely. 

Ann: Just because of Emily. 

Lana: I know what my scores are going to look like. I’m not new here. [laughs] 

Ann: Okay. So, the next category, and this is like, we’re choosing these scores based on them as a collective, which is how they lived their life. Like, I’m not surprised that Branwell died, and then Emily died, and then Anne died. It’s like, yeah, because they can’t… It’s like cutting off the limb of a… They can’t live without all of them. 

Lana: Charlotte tried to have a husband; that didn’t work out. [giggles]

Ann: No, it’s just like it vibes are a bit sort of like The Virgin Suicides sisters. 

Lana: Yes! 

Ann: Except not blonde. It’s like, dark-haired Virgin Suicide sisters. Like, well, either they’re all alive, or they’re all dead. Like, there can’t be some of each, that’s not how it works. Okay, the next category is the Schemieness. Like, Emily, 0. 

Lana: In her writing? Sure. [laughs] She has the schemiest writing. 

Ann: Charlotte had this scheme to, like, “Let’s publish books. Let’s use male pseudonyms.” It’s like Charlotte, that’s a thing she did. That was literally a scheme. 

Lana: Which, more power to her. 

Ann: Yeah, and also the scheme that she’s just not just like, “Hey, let’s have pseudonyms, let’s publish books.” Anne was there trying to like get jobs, but Charlotte was the one who was just like, “We need a source of income. Oh my gosh, you write books? You write books? Let’s write books.” 

Lana: Anne, the scheme is “Let’s be contributing members of society.” Charlotte’s scheme is “You’re all writing a novel right now.” 

Ann: “You’re writing a novel. Let’s choose our pseudonyms. They all have to match.” In terms of Schemieness, I think just being… There’s an inherent schemieness in this era of being a woman who’s a writer because you have to trick your way into it. So, like, knowing how these scores are going to go. [chuckles] I could give them as high as a 5 for Schemieness because it was a scheme and she did do it. And I like the pettiness of the one publisher said no, so then she brought her other book to the other publisher and made him rich. 

Lana: Yes. That was high quality right there. 

Ann: How would you feel about a 5 for Schemieness? 

Lana: I feel anything that makes their score better than Charlotte, it makes me happy. Queen Charlotte. 

Ann: Yes. Queen Charlotte has, famously on this podcast, a score of, I think, 1 out of 40. But yeah, I feel like Charlotte Brontë, like, she didn’t do a lot of schemes, but when she did, it was good, and it worked. Even though Emily’s vibes are bringing down the schemes because she’s, like, so not scheming. 

Lana: Again, most schemey story of all of them. 

Ann: Wuthering Heights. 

Lana: Wuthering Heights. Like, Emily knows what a scheme is, and that’s why her not doing any is more notable. 

Ann: Yeah. Her scheme was to just keep it all in fiction. 

The next category is the Significance, and I think this will be a very high score because I think both they were very well regarded, even before people knew who they were, their books were well regarded, and then when people knew who they were, then they were… The fact that there was a society dedicated to honouring them just, like, a couple of decades after they died, when they all lived very short lives in this very obscure area. And the significance, the fact there’s constantly, every couple of years, a new Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights adaptation. Like, people can’t quit these stories. 

Lana: Well, and the fact that they were Irish Anglicans in England who still spoke Irish, and yet, to this very day, TikTok users are going to war over them. 

Ann: Yeah! Well, the fact that they were so, sort of like, in their…Like, that their father faced so much xenophobia, and then they were… The fact that they achieved… Significance can only go so high, but I think the fact that they’re so significant when… Even when they wrote that poetry book, like you said, they didn’t have any connections. It’s not like Mary Shelley, whose dad was this well-known writer and her mom was this well-known writer, so there were people there pulling for her. But like, they were nobody; they were just three extreme weirdo hermits. [laughs] 

Lana: And they tried to self-pub and didn’t even do that right. 

Ann: But their novels were so good that people couldn’t ignore it. It’s really motivational, I think, for a lot of people. It’s like, with nepo babies and stuff, it’s like, oh, does anyone have a chance? But it’s like, well, these three did! And look what they were doing. They were drinking cemetery water in the middle of the moors. But their book was so good, people found it. It’s inspiring.

Lana: Publishing is hard. Do not compare yourself to the Brontës… It takes work. But, yeah, no. These three and their cemetery water, [laughs] and their little microscopic fandom wars. 

Ann: If you’re looking for a role model, I don’t mean like exactly what they did— Well, thank god, exactly what happened to them, what they did, hopefully it will not happen to anyone else. But I think just the fact that they could… That their ideas, like, that their weird ass books did so well, like, they weren’t writing to market, you know? They weren’t being like, “Ooh! What will sell?” They were just like, “This is all we can write.” 

Lana: I mean, Emily kind of was because Emily is writing the most Mrs. Radcliffe story out there. 

Ann: The most sort of like gothic. 

Lana: Like gothic, stuck in a weird house, weird people, random kid appears, tragic, like, you don’t know whether it’s paranormal, or like, is there a ghost? All that stuff. She’s writing the most to market of the time, but it’s not like there’s a big market out there. There’s not a lot of novels at all, not a lot to compare them to. It’s still a very young art form. 

Ann: And that’s true because we talked about in the Mary Shelley episode, Frankenstein was really quite different from what other novels— Like, all novels were in the form of letters for a long time, and then Frankenstein came along, and that’s part of why that book also has longevity, I think, because it feels contemporary, it feels new and interesting. I’m happy to give them a 10 for Significance, I think. I can’t… In terms of like, women writers that the average person has heard of, even if they haven’t read the book, it’s like, if someone hasn’t heard of the Brontës…

Lana: They’re still taught in schools. 

Ann: But like, you’ve heard the words Wuthering Heights, you’ve heard the name Jane Eyre. Like, Frankenstein, everyone has heard and kind of knows what that is, but like, I think almost everybody— And that’s the reason why I think there is a new Wuthering Heights movie, why Emerald Fennell didn’t just say like, “Hey, I made up a story set in this time period, it’s called whatever.” It’s like, no, when you call it that, then there’s an inherent interest because people have heard that phrase, people kind of know what it is. Even if, and again, the movie comes out this week, doesn’t look like it’s going to be much like the book, but, you know, I’m happy… Great gowns, beautiful gowns. 

So, the Sexism Bonus is how much did sexism hold them back? Now, I will say one way that it did is that Branwell got to go to school, and they didn’t, but they kind of found a way around that. 

Lana: Yeah, it slowed them down. They were clearly the smart ones in the family, and no one was going to let them be, but they found a way anyway. I don’t think they let it slow them down. 

Ann: No, and even the fact that like, “Oh, women can’t publish books,” like, ”Okay, we’ll use men’s names,” and then they did, and then the books were successful. Like, I think there was a lot working against them, like the anti-Irishness, the fact they lived in this… where everyone was dying always, they were poor. Even if it was like the Austens and the father’s like, “Oh my god, you’re great. I’m going to pay…” It’s like, he couldn’t have paid for them to go off and write. He couldn’t have paid for them to go to college; they were poor. Like, that was more of a factor than their sex. 

Lana: They were poor and Irish. I mean, that they were women is just why no one even tried, even though they were clearly geniuses. 

Ann: Yeah. I think there was a lot in their way, but I don’t think sexism was a big one. I think other ones were bigger. 

Lana: Contributing factor at most. 

Ann: Certainly. I mean… So, I don’t know, like a 3? 

Lana: Yeah. Like, it’s not much of a bonus, or shouldn’t be. 

Ann: No, exactly. That’s more for people who had really low scores and everything. Generally, they get a xexism bonus because they couldn’t do anything because the sexism was so bad. But the Brontës had enough going on. So, let me see. The total score, Lana, is a 19. 

Lana: I mean… I know that when you invite me on this episode, I am telling a story, not getting a high score, unless it’s Catherine de’ Medici, and then that’s baked in. [both chuckle] I know my role, I am not Allison. [giggles]

Ann: Well, that’s the thing. Even Allison doesn’t get high scores when she comes on, because those episodes are often very scandalous, but there’s, like, very little significance. 

Lana: I have significance; she’s scandalous. 

Ann: Well, that’s why on this podcast, it’s rare for someone to get a very high score, like, to get high in everything is rare. 

So, just in terms of other people we’ve talked about on this podcast, you and I… For instance. Empress Sisi of Austria is a 22, oh no, 21. And then let me see, Maria Theresa is a 17. So, the Brontës are right between Empress Sisi and Maria Theresa in the Lana Wood Johnson neighbourhood. 

Lana: [laughs] And the most important one of all, Caroline of Brunswick started out as a 21, but we corrected that in later episodes. 

Ann: Well, that’s because that was the very first episode, and I hadn’t calibrated the scale. I didn’t know… I didn’t know what a number would mean, like, unless you’re comparing it to someone else, so she was originally there. 

Lana: The whole purpose of this podcast, the entire reason this exists, is so that Ann can write a book about Caroline of Brunswick. [giggles]

Ann: And it worked. 

Lana: And it worked. 

Ann: With the schemieness of Charlotte Brontë. [both laugh] I was like, “I would like to write a book about Caroline of Brunswick, but you can’t write a book about someone that no one’s heard of if also no one’s heard of you.” So then, I started a podcast so that people would have heard of me, and now my book, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen, is available in bookstores everywhere! Get all the information at RebelOfTheRegency.com. 

Actually, since we’re talking about that, I will just mention to everybody as well that I have some events coming up. For instance, when you’re listening to this, if you’re not going to go see Wuthering Heights movie on Friday night, Friday, the 13th of February, I am having a book launch that’s it’s going to be local to the city I live in, which is Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. But it’s going to also be live-streamed on YouTube, so you can join there, join the chat, ask your questions. I’ll be interacting with everybody. So, that’s going to be this Friday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on YouTube, I’ll put the link in the show notes. So, there’s this event in Saskatoon. And then next week, I’m going to be, February the 19th. I’ll be in Halifax, Nova Scotia doing an event at the library. And then on February 27th, I’m going to be in Vancouver, B.C., at Iron Dog Books. All the information is on the Events page at RebelOfTheRegency.com. 

And I’m really excited for people to read my book. There’s no crossovers between the Brontës and Caroline of Brunswick because they were little toddlers when she died. There is no overlap, although, I guess if you’re doing, like, a six degrees of separation, the Brontës were big fans of Lord Byron, and Lord Byron was one of Caroline’s friends. So… 

Lana: There is a Jane Austen quote, though. 

Ann: Yes. Jane Austen was around when Caroline of Brunswick was having her scandalous time, and Jane Austen… It’s a great quote, it’s in my book. 

Lana: Such a good quote. 

Ann: It’s like, “I will always support Caroline because she is a woman and because I hate her husband.” So, it’s like, Jane Austen supports Caroline of Brunswick, and I think everyone else should, too. 

Thank you, Lana, for this amazing… Like, thank you. Honestly, I was like, I need to do the Brontës because the Wuthering Heights movie is coming up, and this is kind of the time period, and it connects so well with the other women authors I’ve talked about. But I was like, I can’t… I need to have the appropriate level of, like, respect for the Brontës, and I don’t personally have that, and I know so many people are into them. So, I’m happy that you’re here to represent all the Brontë stans. 

Lana: I’m always happy to represent real Brontë fans. 

Ann: Well, thank you so much, Lana. And if people want to hear us talk about Jane Eyre at length, join my Patreon and listen to that episode, which I think is going to come out today as well. Anyway, thank you so much, Lana Wood Johnson. And to everybody else, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

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Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Regency Era artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.

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