Their writing, from the beginning, was fueled by a passionate reading of Romantic poetry, as well as of Shakespeare, Milton, the Arabian Nights, and other works of fantasy, but they were also deeply immersed in the more worldly literary atmosphere of the periodicals, in particular Blackwood's Magazine.
Charlotte attributed the deaths in 1825 of her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth to their stay there.įor a period after this scarring experience the children were all educated at home, where they collectively constructed the imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal, the setting for their highly colored juvenilia, and a source of ongoing fascination into their adult lives. Although, according to Juliet Barker, there is little hard evidence to substantiate the fact, Charlotte's fictionalization of the school as the Lowood of Jane Eyre (1847) suggests that it shared the poor living conditions of the notorious "Yorkshire schools" that so incensed Dickens. In 1824 the girls were sent to a subsidized school for the daughters of impoverished clergymen at Cowan Bridge, near Gretta Bridge, the setting for the hellish Dotheboys Hall of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839).
His Cornish wife, Maria Brontë, died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son. In spite of his name-change, Patrick was never thoroughly at home in middle-class society, and he himself linked the idiosyncrasy of his daughters' literary productions with his own social marginality. Their father, Patrick Brunty, the child of Irish laborers, gained admission to Cambridge University, changed his name to "Brontë," was ordained and, in 1820, became perpetual curate of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire. This fascination is provoked both by the genuine peculiarity of their background and the strong influence of the feelings and scenes of that background upon their writing.
Few literary biographies have inspired as much interest and myth as those of poet-novelists Charlotte (1816–1855) and Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848).
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