This previous weekend I had the chance of taking a visit to Haworth, Yorkshire to discover the house of the Brontë sisters. My analysis centres upon Anne Brontë and the distinctive types of radical politics and literary innovation in her writing indebted to her complicated philosophical, political, and theological beliefs. Central to my analysis is bringing Anne to the forefront of literary and political historical past, a rightful place to which she has typically been marginalised. Anne’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Corridor, printed underneath the pseudonym, Acton Bell, created fairly a stir in her time, promoting so quickly, a second version together with her well-known feminist preface was printed earlier than the 12 months was out. Her daring representations of gender-based violence and the oppression of ladies led to appreciable virulence within the press, with many making claims of impropriety, ought to the writer be a girl. Within the legacy of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Girl, in 1848, Anne was among the many first girls writers to publically assert mental gender equality:
‘All novels are, or ought to be, written for each women and men to learn, and I’m at a loss to conceive how a person ought to allow himself to write down something that will be actually disgraceful to a girl, or why a girl ought to be censured for writing something that will be correct and turning into for a person.’
Why, then, has Anne been forged to the aspect? Certainly, when the feminist author Virginia Woolf praised the greatness of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Anne was left fully unmentioned. The explanations for this are complicated. A central facet I’ve lately been contemplating is the mythologisation of the Brontës. As Lucasta Miller describes in her ebook, The Brontë Fantasy, the Brontës grew to become a cultural phenomenon within the many years following Charlotte’s loss of life. From the continuous re-writings of Charlotte since Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography to the twentieth-century cult of a mystically impressed Emily, the Brontë story has come to exist within the public creativeness in a approach virtually separate from their writings. The Sixties ‘purple heather’ faculty of Brontës biography had been a collection of stagings of the identical melodrama: determined, handwritten manuscripts, the tempestuous windswept moors, the Gothic impossibilities striding bolding throughout the web page; and the tiny remoted village the place three unassuming girls bent over their desks. This concept of the Brontës and their reception in tradition is carefully associated to my concern with contemplating Anne anew. Thus, I’ve been contemplating how Anne’s unflinching dedication to real-world reality and her uncompromising beliefs have sarcastically led to her presentation because the didactic, uninteresting, and moralistic sister in distinction to the mythologised Charlotte and Emily. Furthermore, this mystic apolitical mythologisation is unimaginable to use to Anne as a result of her firmly unambiguous politics and truth-telling mission regarding the actual world. 
My journey to Haworth supplied an illuminating glimpse into the actual world of the Brontës. I skilled the gorgeous panorama that so keenly knowledgeable their writings, I walked via the tightly certain Church neighborhood during which they lived every day, I even noticed the very desk and the writing desks that they utilized in writing their nice novels. However maybe essentially the most rewarding discovery was seeing, too, how they had been, at coronary heart, merely human. I noticed their letters, their childhood drawings, their scribbles in lesson books, Charlotte’s annotations in The Aeneid alongside her ordering for a brand new pair of gloves. I noticed a easy lock of Anne’s hair certain in a plait. In actual fact, I discovered essentially the most shifting factor I noticed in my journey was a small biblical verse sampler by a ten-year-old Anne together with her identify signed on the backside.
This, I feel, is what makes Anne so unbelievable. The mythologising of the Brontës has made Charlotte and Emily preternatural figures within the creativeness and has dulled Anne, making her a forgotten pioneer. Because the twentieth-century novelist, Could Sinclair wrote dismissively of Anne, ‘she had not one of the very good unconscious of genius’. Although Sinclair praises the unmistakable pressure of Anne’s writing, she subordinates her to the Romantic poetics concept of the ‘genius’ which she ascribes to her mythologised sisters. 
However, in fact, the reality about Anne and her sisters is that they had been as actual as you and I. The Romantic concept of the ‘genius’ is nothing in comparison with their actually human unwavering braveness, fortitude, and resilience. They weren’t superhuman, transcendent beings, like Emily’s heroine Catherine Earnshaw, however extra like Anne’s, unassuming however large heroine, Agnes Gray. Anne’s writings might have been misplaced amid the stormy myths of the Brontës, however as I walked down from Haworth Church, twenty-first-century footsteps upon Victorian cobbles, I believed to myself how in that very braveness and unwavering conviction by which she sought to vary the world, with the voice that made Anne so completely different, she had created one thing that will at all times matter, a hope that might by no means be forgotten.
I want to sincerely thank the Laidlaw Scholarship Basis for offering me with the funds to make this illuminating journey attainable.
