One hundred and seventy five years ago, a young writer died of tuberculosis in Scarborough, where she had begged her sister to take her so that she might see the sea before she left this Earth. Anne Brontë was only 29, but she had already published poems and two striking novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

The quietest of the three Brontë sisters is on the brink of a revival. Recent UK theatrical productions, especially Emme Hoy’s 2022 adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Sarah Gordon’s light but pointed Underdog: The Other Other Brontë running at the National Theatre in London, are bringing Anne out of the shadows at last.

Anne was never completely obscure, but nonetheless thrown into the shade by the multitude of biographies devoted to her sisters, not to mention the deluge of TV and film adaptations. While the few standalone biographies are excellent, including Ada M Harrison and Derek Stanford’s 1959 volume, Edward Chitham’s 1991 Life and Nick Holland’s illuminating In Search of Anne Brontë, they struggle to compete with the deluge of content devoted to Charlotte and Emily.

I had, like many people, neglected her woefully; reading Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall just recently was a hair-raising experience, an introduction to her merciless eye and boldness in tackling taboos — the casual viciousness of Victorian children, alcoholism and marriage, domestic abuse.

At 19, Anne became a governess at Blake Hall in Mirfield, less than 20 miles away from the Brontes’ home at Haworth. It was, she wrote in a letter, “misery” to be charged with children who acted like “mischievous turbulent rebels”; her only outlet in those eight miserable months was secretly writing Agnes Grey, which drew freely on her travails. Her protagonist occupies a position light years away from the genteel governessing of Jane Eyre. “The name of governess, I soon found, was a mere mockery as applied to me,” Agnes writes. “My pupils had no more notion of obedience than a wild, unbroken colt.”  The boy in her care delights in torturing baby birds; the girl turns into an obdurate block, lying on the floor during her lessons.

Some of her biographers speculate that Mirfield inspired one of the stately manors in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, while Ponden Hall in Yorkshire may have inspired Wildfell Hall itself. She creates a stirring heroine in Helen Huntingdon, who supports herself as an artist by — astonishingly for the period — selling her own accomplished sketches and paintings. She then runs away from home with her young son to Wildfell, rejecting suitors with the bald proclamation that she simply does not like them.

But Anne also conjures the horrors of life with an alcoholic husband. She, Emily and Charlotte had first-hand experience of alcoholism — their brother Branwell drowned his artistic gifts in drink, and the sisters were left to nurse him or clean up his frequent messes. When Tenant was published, the novel stirred up both praise and accusations that it was scandalous. Charles Kingsley, reviewing it for Fraser’s Magazine, said it was powerful and interesting, but also declared that it was “utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls”. The Spectator felt it necessary to warn readers of the author’s “morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal”.

Reading the Brontës, perhaps the greatest difference is, while Charlotte wrote for readers who might prefer high romance to the dreary messiness of life, Anne wrote for governesses like herself — gentlewomen who found themselves thrust into a demeaning position, grappling with little tyrants and their indifferent parents. For, if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are passionate love stories, Tenant is an anti-romance, profoundly disillusioned by the realities of courtship and marriage — and thus perhaps the first truly feminist novel. In 1914, the suffragist May Sinclair called it “faintly prophetic, propped between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, it stands as the presentment of that Feminist novel which we all know.”

One of the great literary mysteries concerns Charlotte Brontë’s refusal to allow Tenant to be republished after Anne’s death. Was this sibling rivalry, or a desire to protect her sister’s posthumous image? Or perhaps it was a fear that Anne had succeeded too well in drawing an accurate portrait of Branwell in his cups. It was only after Charlotte’s death in 1855, of complications in her pregnancy after her brief marriage, that the book finally returned to the public eye. 

For anyone searching for the real Anne, not the frail, little, gentle woman of myth, I urge them to read her fiery preface to Tenant’s second edition, published just a few months before she died. “All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read,” she writes. “If I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense.” What an unexpected pleasure, to find an author who eschews “soft nonsense”, dipping her pen instead in black irony and molten steel. (Nilanjana Roy)