Three of the most enduring English novels of the nineteenth century were written in one Yorkshire parsonage by three sisters who shared its living and writing spaces — above all the dining-room table where they wrote and discussed their work — and a servant's fund of moorland stories. The Brontë family tree is short, dense and brutally foreshortened: Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born curate, married Maria Branwell of Penzance in 1812; she bore six children between 1814 and 1820, in less than six years, and died in 1821; and Patrick, who lived to 1861, outlived every one of them. The tree is worth reading precisely because it fits on a single page and still contains 'Jane Eyre', 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'.
The generation above is Irish and Cornish. Patrick was the son of Hugh Brunty, a tenant farmer and storyteller in County Down, and Eleanor McClory, said to have converted to Protestantism on marriage; Patrick himself restyled the surname Brontë. When Maria fell ill, her elder sister Elizabeth Branwell came north from Penzance to nurse her and stayed twenty years, raising the children in a house where she and Patrick co-parented with courteous distance — she took most meals alone in her room. The Yorkshire servant Tabitha Aykroyd arrived in 1824 and stayed thirty years, and her dialect and folklore run straight into Emily's novel.
The six children were Maria (1814-1825), Elizabeth (1815-1825), Charlotte (1816-1855), Patrick Branwell (1817-1848), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849). Tuberculosis contracted at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge killed Maria and Elizabeth within six weeks of each other in 1825; Charlotte, who idolised Maria and memorialised her as Helen Burns, became the effective eldest. Emily and Anne were the tightest dyad, joint architects of the Gondal saga; Charlotte and Branwell were the other writing pair, on Angria, until his affair with his employer's wife Lydia Robinson cost him Thorp Green and Charlotte's sympathy. Branwell died in September 1848, Emily in December, Anne at Scarborough in May 1849.
Charlotte's last years extended the tree sideways rather than downward: Ellen Nussey as lifelong correspondent, Constantin Heger as the unanswered Brussels attachment behind 'Villette', Elizabeth Gaskell as friend and biographer, and Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, whom Patrick furiously opposed before accepting. Charlotte married Nicholls in 1854 and died in 1855, pregnant, at 38; the line ended there. The version above follows Gaskell's 'The Life of Charlotte Brontë' (1857) and the Nussey letters, the two documents that made a Haworth curate's household into the most visited literary family in England.
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