THE BRONTË SISTERS

“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”
— Charlotte Brontë

When Patrick Brontë died at age 84, he outlived, Charlotte Brontë, who wrote , and Anne Brontë, the lesser known of the threesome but no less talented, who wrote . Anne was just three months old when the family moved into Haworth Parsonage in West Yorkshire, her mother dying from uterine cancer just 17 months after relocating. Lacking the money to send his daughters to more illustrious schools, Patrick enrolled his eldest Maria, as well as Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily in the Clergy Daughters’ School at Lancashire, only to see them sent back a year later - his eldest Maria, age 11, dead from tuberculosis, and his second eldest, Elizabeth, suffering the same fate two weeks after returning home. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne stayed home at the parsonage, surrounded by windswept moors, studying and reading literature, inspired by Patrick’s extensive library. Here, the young writers wrote their famous works, only for their literary output to be prematurely cut short by the same illness that took their sisters: tuberculosis. Emily died first, at age 30, and  was her only novel. Less than six months later, Anne died, age 29. Charlotte completed in the parsonage with her father, now blind. She died six years after Anne’s death, at age 38, due to complications from pregnancy.