Brit Lit Book Club

The Brontë Sisters - Growing Up Wild

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The Brit Lit Book Club - Episode 5: The Brontë Sisters - Growing Up Wild

Step into the windswept world of the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—three isolated children who transformed childhood fantasies into some of the most passionate and psychologically complex novels ever written. From the remote Yorkshire moors to literary immortality, discover how extreme isolation, family tragedy, and raw creative genius created Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Join host Vanessa as she explores the extraordinary lives of the Brontë family at Haworth Parsonage, where death was always present and imagination knew no bounds.

In this episode, we explore:

  • Life at Haworth Parsonage and the contaminated graveyard water that may have killed them
  • The Brontës' elaborate childhood fantasy worlds: Angria and Gondal
  • How Victorian family tragedy shaped their dark, Gothic novels
  • The famous portrait of the sisters painted by their brother
  • Patrick Brontë's bullet holes in the church tower
  • How isolation fueled revolutionary literary techniques decades ahead of their time
  • The sisters' evening walks around the dining room table as they workshopped their novels
  • Their brief, tragic lives and lasting literary legacy
  • Why Emily Brontë refused to acknowledge authorship of Wuthering Heights

Perfect for fans of Victorian literature, Gothic novels, the Brontë family, and anyone fascinated by how tragedy transforms into art. Whether you're a longtime Brontë devotee or discovering these remarkable sisters for the first time, this episode reveals the wild, passionate lives behind the novels.

Book Recommendations:

For Understanding Their Lives:

For Their Childhood and Creative Development:

For Historical Fiction:

Next Episode: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - exploring literature's most compelling governess who refused to accept society's limitations.

Experience the Brontë World Yourself: Walk the moors, see Emily's blood-stained handkerchief, dine by firelight in an ancient shooting hut, and read Brontë poetry where it was written. Learn more about The Book Club Tour's British literature experiences at thebookclubtour.com

Use code BRITLIT for $300 off the July 2026 tour!

Love this podcast? Imagine walking the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës found inspiration, visiting Jane Austen's writing desk at Chawton, and exploring Shakespeare's birthplace with fellow book lovers. We do all this and more on The Book Club Tour!

Follow along with our adventures, or join us!

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Hello and welcome back to the Brit Lit Book Club. I'm your host, Vanessa, and I'm delighted you to join me for what might be our most haunting literary adventure. Yet before we begin, grab yourself a cup of tea. I'm warming my hands around a robust Yorkshire tea this morning. Which feels perfectly appropriate for where we're heading today. There's something about the strength of a proper Yorkshire brew that suits the wild windswept story we're about to explore. So far, we've journeyed through Jane Austen's civilized drawing rooms where wit and social observation reign Supreme. Today we're leaving those elegant parlors behind and climbing up the Yorkshire moors to an isolated parsonage, where three extraordinary sisters transformed childhood games into some of the most passionate, disturbing, and psychologically complex novels ever written. Quick pronunciation note before we go any further. It's Bron-TEE or Bron-TAY with two syllables. Both pronunciations are accepted depending on the region you're in. In Yorkshire, they say Bron-TEE, so that's how I'll refer to them. See those two little dots over the E? That's called a esis, and it tells you to pronounce the E separately. Patrick Brontë added it himself when he changed the family name from the Irish Brunty, B-R-U-N-T-Y, or Prunty, P-R-U-N-T-Y. We're not sure. He was possibly inspired by Lord Nelson, who had been made the Duke of Brontë a place in Sicily. So Patrick essentially rebranded the family with a fancier name and the added dots to make sure people didn't pronounce it Brontë. It is the 19th century equivalent of adding an accent mark to make your name look more sophisticated. And honestly, it worked. The BRUNTY sisters just doesn't have the same ring to it. I'm particularly fond of the Brontë sisters because when I was a little girl, I lived in Scotland with my grandma who was working on her PhD in British literature at the University of St. Andrews. Can you tell where I got my love of British literature? So during my time with her, we made pilgrimages to several literary locations, including the Brontë, parsonage, in Haworth. I was only nine years old and this place made a deep impression on me. Another note on pronunciation, the town of Haworth, where the Brontë sisters grew up. H-A-W-O-R-T-H. I always said Hayworth before I knew how to say it, but in New Yorkshire, they pronounce it HOW-ETH. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Their names alone, conjure images of windswept landscapes, brooding heroes, and gothic romance. But here's what I want you to understand today. Before they became literary legends, they were three lonely children creating elaborate fantasy worlds to escape from the harsh realities of their isolated lives. Basically they were the original Dungeon Masters except instead of dice and dragons, they had tiny handmade books and emotional devastation. This isn't just a story about talented writers who happen to be sisters. It's a story about how extreme isolation, family tragedy, and the raw beauty of the Yorkshire landscape combined to create imagination so powerful. They changed the course of English literature forever. These women didn't write from comfortable social positions, they wrote from the margins. Geographically, socially, and economically marginal lives that most Victorian society would've considered failures. If you think struggling to make it as a writer today is hard, try doing it from a remote Yorkshire Village with no internet, no agent and Victorian society telling you that women shouldn't even be reading novels, let alone writing them. So let's climb up to How with Parsonage and meet the children who grew up wild on the moors and became the most extraordinary literary family in English history. And I can tell you from experience, there's something absolutely transformative about standing in the actual places where the Brontë's lived and created. When we visit How with Parsonage on The Book Club Tour, we don't just look at the parsonage from the outside. We step inside and see the artifacts of their lives. The tiny handmade books where they wrote their childhood stories in microscopic handwriting, and I mean microscopic, like you need a magnifying glass to actually read them. Emily apparently decided normal sized handwriting was for quitters. The dresses they wore so small, you realize how petite they were, the toys they played with as children. The most haunting of them all, a handkerchief stained with the blood from Emily's tuberculosis, a stark reminder of the disease that stalked this family. Yes, they kept the bloody handkerchief. The Victorians were nothing if not committed to preserving evidence of suffering. We stand in that graveyard that was literally their front yard surrounded by the tombstones they saw every single day. Talk about a room with a view. We visit the church where Charlotte and Emily are buried, where the family sat through countless services and we understand viscerally how death was always present in their lives. But the experience that stays with people the most is our walk across the moors themselves. We take a beautiful two mile walk through a wild landscape that the sisters loved so much, and we end up at an ancient shooting hut where our local private chef prepares a meal for us using fresh Yorkshire ingredients. As we eat by the fire in the centuries old stone building surrounded by the windswept moorland, we read from the Brontë's poetry and Letters. There's something magical about hearing the sisters' words in a place that inspired them with the same wind they felt on their faces blowing outside. These immersive experiences, seeing the items from their lives, walking, the landscapes they walked, feeling the isolation and the wild beauty that help us understand how these sisters transformed their harsh isolated lives into literary genius. Let's talk about life at Haworth parsonage. Picture this, it's 1820 and you're climbing the steep cobbled street that leads up to Haworth Village in Yorkshire. The wind is fierce. It almost always is here, and it carries the smell of pete smoke and Heather. At the top of the hill sits a Georgian stone parsonage isolated at the very edge of the village with nothing beyond it, but miles and miles of wild moorland stretching to the horizon. This is where the Brontë children grew up. And understanding this place is so crucial to understanding everything. They would later write. Haworth Parsonage was the home of Reverend Patrick Brontë, an ambitious Irishman who had worked his way up from poverty to become a Church of England clergymen. He married Maria Branwell, a Methodist from Cornwall, and together they had six children. Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick called Branwell, Emily and Anne. Okay. Also a note on spelling and pronunciation. Maria is spelled like Maria, M-A-R-I-A, but pronounced Maria for both their mother and sister. But their mother, Maria died of cancer in 1821 when Charlotte was just five years old, Emily was three, and Anne was one. The children were left in the care of their father and Maria's sister, Elizabeth Branwell, who came from Cornwall to help raise them. Aunt Branwell was dutiful, but cold. She never really adapted to Yorkshire life and spent most of her time in her room leaving the children largely to their own devices. She basically moved from sunny Cornwall to the windiest Bleakest spot in England and decided the best coping mechanism was just to stay in her room. Honestly, relatable. The isolation was extreme. Haworth was a small industrial village, not the picturesque rural community you might imagine. It was a place of textile mills, overcrowding housing, and poor sanitation. The water supply was contaminated and the average life expectancy was just 25 years. 25. The parsonage graveyard was literally in their front yard. A constant reminder of mortality that would haunt all their writing. Nothing says"cheerful childhood", quite like a graveyard view from your bedroom window. And speaking of the graveyard, here's where it gets even more grim. Modern historians and public health researchers have studied Haworth records and believe the contaminated water supply was a major contributor to the Brontë's illness and early deaths. The graveyard wasn't just their view, it was literally poisoning them. The water table beneath Haworth was contaminated by seepage from all those graves, and the contaminated water fed into the village's drinking supply. Recent studies of Victorian cemetery practices have shown that in overcrowded graveyards, like Haworth decomposition byproducts regularly contaminated local water sources spreading typhoid, cholera, and other diseases. The Brontë were essentially drinking graveyard runoff. So not only did they have to look at death every day from their windows, they were also slowly being poisoned by it. It is almost too perfectly gothic to be real, except it was tragically horribly real. The very thing that inspired their dark death haunted literature may have been killing them the entire time. So back to the moors. For the Brontë children, the real world lay beyond the village on the moors. These weren't gentle English countryside, they were wild, dangerous landscapes of peat bogs, misty skies, and treacherous rain. In winter, they were brutal and isolating. In summer, they were breathtakingly beautiful, but still perfectly capable of killing you if you weren't careful. The children roamed these mores freely, which was unusual for the time. Middle class Victorian children were typically kept close at home, especially girls, but Patrick Brontë believed in physical exercise and freedom, and the children spent hours wandering the moorland, developing an intimate relationship with this wild landscape that would infuse their later writings. While other Victorian girls were practicing their needle point indoors, the Brontë sisters were out tramping through peat bogs and all weather. Patrick Brontë accidentally raising feminists since 1820. Then came the tragedy that would define their childhood. In 1824, when Charlotte was eight, Patrick sent his four oldest daughters to the clergy daughters' school at Cowan Bridge. A charity school for the daughters of Poor Clergymen. The conditions were horrific, inadequate food, brutal discipline, freezing temperatures and endemic illness. Basically, imagine the worst boarding school experience possible, then make it colder with less food. Maria and Elizabeth, the two oldest girls, both contracted totuberculosis at school. They were sent home to die. Maria, who was only 11, died in May, 1825, Elizabeth followed in June. Charlotte and Emily were immediately brought home, but the trauma of losing their two older sisters and the guilt of surviving when Maria and Elizabeth didn't marked all the remaining children forever. Charlotte would later immortalize Cowan Bridge as Lowood school in Jane Eyre, and Maria as the saintly, Helen Burns, who dies of consumption. Charlotte basically turned her childhood trauma into literature. But the real impact was on the family dynamic. Suddenly, Charlotte at nine years old, found herself the eldest of four surviving children responsible for helping to hold the family together. This is when their famous childhood fantasies began in earnest, Patrick Brontë brought home a box of 12 wooden soldiers for Branwell in June 1826. The children immediately seized on these toys. They became complex, ongoing sagas that lasted for years and involved detailed political intrigue, romantic relationships, and psychological exploration. Other kids, played with toys for an afternoon. The Brontë Children created entire civilizations with constitutional governments and literary magazines. Charlotte and Branwell created the Kingdom Angria. A fictional realm in Africa with a complex political system, royal families and ongoing wars. Emily and Anne created Gondal, a mysterious island nation with its own geography, history, and royal dynasties. These weren't casual make-believe The children wrote newspapers. Drew Maps created genealogies and chronicled the histories of these imaginary worlds and tiny handmade books. They wrote obsessively. By the time they were teenagers, they had created hundreds of these miniature books, written and handwriting so tiny, it's almost microscopic. The Angria and Gondal Chronicles eventually amounted to thousands of pages, more than many published authors produced in their entire careers. But here's what's crucial. These childhood fantasies weren't innocent fairytales. They were filled with passion, violence, moral ambiguity, and psychological complexity. The characters. Were by ironic heroes and heroines, dark, brooding, morally ambiguous figures who were driven by intense passions and often destructive impulses. While their contemporaries were reading morally instructive stories about obedient children. The Brontë were creating soap operas featuring murder, adultery, and political intrigue. This was their education in storytelling, and it was completely outside any conventional literary tradition. While other aspiring writers were reading classical texts and following established forms, the Brontë children were creating their own literary universe, developing their own narrative voices and exploring themes that polite Victorian society prefer to ignore. The isolation that might have stunted other children's development, instead, intensified their imaginative lives to an extraordinary degree. They had each other, they had the wild landscape of the moors. And they had the freedom to create whatever worlds their minds could conceive. It turns out that extreme boredom, combined with exceptional intelligence and zero adult supervision is an excellent recipe for literary genius To understand how extraordinary the Brontë family was, we need to understand typical Victorian family structures and how dramatically the Brontë is departed from them. In most Victorian middle class families, there was a clear hierarchy. Father as an absolute authority mother managing domestic affairs, children strictly disciplined and kept in their proper places. Girls were prepared for marriage and domesticity. Boys for careers. Education for girls, focused on accomplishments, a little French, some drawing, perhaps piano. Designed to make them attractive to potential husbands. The Victorian version of"learning to code to get a good job", except it was"learn to play the piano badly to get a husband." But the Brontë household operated by completely different roles. Patrick Brontë was certainly the patriarch, but he was an unusual Victorian father. Here's a fun little story about Patrick Brontë. If you visit Haworth today and look closely at the church tower across from the parsonage, you'll see bullet holes pockmarked in the stone. Those are from Patrick's pistol.​Patrick, had worked near the Luddite riots earlier in his career, and the experience left him cautious. He kept a loaded Flintlock pistol by his bedside every night for protection. But he was also sensible enough to know that keeping a loaded weapon in the house full of children wasn't ideal and he wanted to make sure his gun was working. So every morning, like clockwork, he would discharge the pistol by firing it at the church tower. Just step outside, aim at the stonework, and bang, start the day. The church has been rebuilt since the Brontë's time. It was demolished in 1879 because it was structurally unsound and contaminated water from the graveyard was seeping up through the floor. Shocker. But the tower survived, and those bullet holes are still there. A quirky reminder of the eccentric clergymen who raised three of England's greatest novelists. Imagine the Brontë children waking up every morning to the sound of your father shooting at the church. No wonder they grew up writing gothic novels. He encouraged all his children to think independently, to read widely and to express their opinions. He discussed politics with them, shared his books with them, and treated them as intellectual equals in many ways. This was revolutionary. Most Victorian fathers wouldn't have dreamed of asking their daughters opinions on politics. Patrick was out there having full debates with his daughters about parliamentary reform. This was partly necessity. With no wife and an elderly aunt who preferred to stay in her room, Patrick relied on his children for companionship and intellectual stimulation, but it was also philosophical. Patrick believed in education for women and the importance of developing the mind regardless of gender. The result was that the Brontë girls grew up with an intellectual freedom that was almost unprecedented for their time and class. They read widely everything from the Bible to Shakespeare, to contemporary novels, political essays, and romantic poetry. They discussed ideas, debated philosophy, and were encouraged to form their own opinions about literature, politics, and religion. But this intellectual freedom came at a cost. The children were emotionally intense, psychologically complex, and often difficult to manage. Branwell, the only boy was particularly troubled. He was brilliant but unstable, prone to depression, alcoholism, and grandiose schemes that always ended in failure. He was basically that person who has incredible potential but keeps self-sabotaging at the worst possible moments. The family dynamic was complicated by the children's extreme closeness to each other, and their distance from the outside world. They developed their own private language, their own jokes, their own ways of understanding the world. This created an almost impenetrable bond between them, but it also made it difficult for them to form relationships with other people. They were like the world's most intense book club, except the only members were siblings. Charlotte tried several times to leave home for work as a governess or teacher, but she was always miserably, homesick, and desperate to return to Haworth. Emily literally could not function away from home. Every attempt to send her to school or work ended with her becoming physically ill and having to return. Emily's response to being sent away was basically no thanks. I'd no thanks. I'd literally rather die, and she meant it. Ann was the most adaptable, but even she struggled with the isolation and difficulty of working as a governess in other people's homes. This psychological independence was both their strength and their limitation. They supported each other's creativity, encouraged each other's ambitions, and provided each other with the emotional intimacy that they couldn't find elsewhere. But they also reinforced each other's tendencies towards introversion, intensity and difficulty with conventional social relationships. They had created their own little literary bubble and the outside world kept rudely trying to pop it. The tragedy that overshadowed their entire lives was tuberculosis, this disease that had killed their mother and two older sisters, and that would eventually claim most of the remaining family members. In the 19th century tuberculosis was called"the white death" because of how it slowly wasted away its victims. It was endemic in industrial areas like Haworth, where poor sanitation and overcrowded living conditions help spread the disease. The Victorians had many charming names for things, but"the white death" really commits to the gothic aesthetic. The Brontë children grew up knowing that death was always close. They saw it in their graveyard view, they remembered it from their mother's death and their sister's deaths, and they lived with the constant possibility that any of them might be next. This awareness of mortality infused everything they wrote with a sense of urgency and intensity. When you grow up with a literal graveyard in your front yard, you develop a certain perspective on life's brevity. But tragedy struck the family in other ways too. Branwell, who had been the golden child, the boy who was supposed to carry the family's intellectual ambitions, gradually self-destructed. He failed as an artist, failed as a tutor, failed as a railway clerk, and finally fell into alcoholism and opium addiction. When you visit the Brontë parsonage, they have recreated Branwell's room to show you just how chaotic his mind was. There's one artifact from their lives that captures the family dynamic almost too perfectly. Branwell painted a portrait of his three sisters around 1834, Charlotte, Emily and Anne standing together. But originally he included himself in the painting, standing between Emily and Charlotte. At some point, he painted himself out, leaving just a ghostly pillar like shape where he once stood. Art conservators. Discover the self portrait underneath using x-rays, and you can still see the faint outline of where he used to be. It's heartbreaking when you think about it. This brilliant young man who literally erased himself from his own family portrait, leaving only a shadow. Some scholars think he removed himself because he felt he wasn't good enough as an artist. Others believe it was symbolic of his growing sense of failure and isolation from his accomplished sisters. Either way, it's one of the most poignant artifacts of their lives. Three sisters standing together and a ghost where their brother should have been. The painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery now and the phantom pillar between the sisters is almost more powerful than if he'd left himself in. It's Branwell's entire tragic story in one image. His decline was devastating for the whole family, but especially for Emily who had been closest to him. She watched her brilliant brother destroy himself and was powerless to stop it. The experience of loving someone who is self-destructive appears again and again in her writing, most famously in Wuthering Heights. The sisters dealt with these family tragedies by pouring their emotions into their writing. Their novels aren't polite, Victorian domestic fiction. They're raw, emotional explorations of love, loss, obsession, and psychological extremity. They wrote about characters who were damaged, passionate, and often self-destructive because that's what they knew from their own family experience. Their therapy was writing novels that would horrify their contemporaries. Highly effective if unconventional. But they also wrote about survival, about finding meaning in suffering, and about the possibility of redemption even in the darkest circumstances. Their novels are dark, but they're not hopeless. They suggest that even in the most difficult circumstances, human dignity and love can endure. This combination of emotional intensity, intellectual freedom, and intimate knowledge of suffering created writers who were uniquely equipped to explore the darker aspects of human psychology that most Victorian authors avoided. While other writers were penning stories about finding suitable husbands and learning proper manners, the Brontë's were writing about obsession, revenge, and whether love can survive beyond death. Slightly different vibes. And here's the paradox of the Brontë sisters, their geographical and social isolation, which should have limited their imaginative horizons instead expanded them beyond anything their contemporaries achieved. Most writers of their era drew inspiration from society, from London, literary circles, from travel, from social connections, and cultural institutions. The Brontë's had none of this. They lived in a remote Yorkshire village, rarely traveled and had minimal contact with other writers or artists. And yet they created some of the most innovative and psychologically penetrating fiction of the 19th century. How did this happen? First, the isolation forced them to turn inward. Without external distractions and social obligations they had nearly unlimited time to develop their inner lives. The elaborate fantasy worlds they created as children, Angria and Gondal, became their universities, their laboratories for exploring human psychology and narrative technique. Who needs Oxford when you have an imaginary kingdom and unlimited free time? Right. These childhood games taught them something crucial about the storytelling that formal education might have obscured. That the most compelling stories come from emotional truth rather than social convention. While other writers were learning to follow established literary forms, the Brontës were inventing their own forms based on psychological realism and emotional intensity. Yes. They basically said,"your rules don't apply here" to the entire English literary establishment, and somehow got away with it. Second, the landscape itself became a character in their imagination. The Yorkshire moors weren't just a backdrop for their childhood adventures, they became a psychological landscape that shaped how they understood human emotion and relationships. Think about how Emily uses the moors and Wuthering Heights. They're not just scenery, they're a reflection of the character's inner lives. The wild, untamed landscapes mirrors the heath cliff and Catherine's passionate, destructive, love. The isolation of the manors reflects the character's emotional isolation from society. The harsh weather mirrors the emotional storms that drive the plot. Emily looked at the bleak windswept landscape and thought, yes, this is a perfect metaphor for a toxic relationship. And she was absolutely right. This wasn't a conscious literary technique that Emily learned from other writers. It grew organically from her intimate relationship with the landscape she lived in. She understood instinctively that external environment and internal emotion are connected because that's how she had experienced the world since childhood. Third, their isolation from conventional society freed them to explore taboo subjects, and unconventional characters. They weren't writing for London drawing rooms or trying to please establish literary critics. They were writing from their own experience and imagination without worrying about what was considered proper or socially acceptable. The advantage of having no social life is that you also have no social pressure, silver lining, maybe. This freedom allowed them to create characters like Heath Cliff, a dark, passionate foundling who becomes wealthy through morally questionable means and seeks revenge against the family that rejected him. No other Victorian novelist would have dared create such a character as a romantic hero. Most Victorian heroes were polite gentlemen, with good manners and steady incomes. Emily gave us an emotionally damaged revenge seeker with anger management issues and said he's the romantic lead. Deal with it. It allowed Charlotte to write Jane Eyre a plain poor governance, who refuses to accept a subordinate position and demands to be treated as an equal by her wealthy employer. The novel shocked contemporary readers because Jane was so assertive, so unwilling to accept the limitations that society placed on women of her class. Jane basically invented,"I know my worth" culture in 1847. It allowed Anne to write the tenet of Wildfell Hall, a novel about an abusive marriage and a woman's right to leave her husband. Subjects that were so controversial, the novel was suppressed for decades after Ann's death. Ann wrote the Victorian equivalent of a"me too" novel, and her own sister thought it was too radical to publish. That's how ahead of her time she was. The isolation also intensified their emotional lives to an extraordinary degree without the buffer of social activity and external distractions. They felt everything more deeply. Their loves, their losses, their fears, their hopes, all were magnified by the intensity of their inner lives. They had the emotional intensity of a teenager writing poetry at 2:00 AM. Except they were adults and the poetry was actually good. This emotional intensity shows up in their writing as psychological realism and was decades ahead of its time. Their characters aren't types or symbols. They're complex psychological portraits of people driven by conflicting emotions, unconscious desires, and internal contradictions. But perhaps most importantly, the isolation taught them to find drama and internal experience rather than external events. While other Victoria novelists were writing about social adventures and romantic intrigues, the Brontës were exploring the interior landscapes of consciousness, memory, and desire. Jane Ayer's most dramatic moments aren't external adventures. They're moments of internal recognition and decision. The famous scene where she hears Rochester calling to her across the moors isn't a supernatural event. It's a psychological breakthrough where Jane finally understands what she needs to do. Wuthering Heights is structured on a series of nested narratives told by different characters, each revealing different aspects of the central story. This complex narrative structure grows out of Emily's understanding that truth is always subjective, always filtered through individual consciousness and memory. Emily invented unreliable narrators before it was cool. The isolation that might have limited other writers instead pushed the Brontës to develop narrative techniques and psychological insights that wouldn't become common in literature for another 50 years. They anticipated modernist concerns with subjective experience, unreliable narration, and the complexity of human motivation. They were basically writing 20th century novels in the 1840s, but nobody quite knew what to do with them. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Brontë's story is how sisters supported and influenced each other's writing, while maintaining completely distinctive literary voices. Every evening after household chores were done and Patrick Brontë had retired to his study, the three sisters would walk around the dining room table together discussing their work in progress. They called this their"evening walk", and it became their writing workshop. A space where they could share ideas, work through plot problems, and encourage each other's creative development. The Victorian version of a writer's group, except instead of meeting at Starbucks, they paced in circles around their dining room table for hours. Charlotte described these sessions years later. Remembering how they would pace the small room together for hours, talking through their stories, debating character motivations, and testing dialogue on each other. The physical movement, while thinking became so habitual that Charlotte and Emily continued their practice even when they were alone. They literally walked in circles while writing. But despite this close collaboration, each sister developed a completely distinctive literary voice. Charlotte was the most conventional of the three. Writing what she called plain and homely stories about governances and teachers who face moral dilemmas and eventually find love and security. But her plain stories were revolutionary and their insistence that ordinary women deserve to be the heroes of their own stories. Charlotte's idea of plain and homely included gothic mansions, secret wives, and addicts and mysterious midnight fires. Her standards for ordinary were interesting. Emily was the most extreme and experimental. Wuthering Heights was unlike anything else in Victorian literature, violent, passionate, morally ambiguous, and structurally complex. She created a narrative technique that wouldn't become common until the modernist movement of the early 20th century. Emily wrote one novel and said, I'm done. And that one novel is so weird and brilliant that people are still trying to figure it out over 175 years later. And they're still making movie adaptations. Ann was perhaps the most radical of all, although she's often overlooked. She wrote about subjects that her contemporaries found shocking domestic violence, alcoholism, women's right to leave their abusive marriages. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was so controversial that Charlotte suppressed its republication after Anne's death, feeling it was too disturbing for public consumption. Anne wrote a feminist manifesto disguised as a novel, and everyone was so scandalized they tried to pretend it didn't exist. The sisters published their novels under male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell notice how they used their first initials) partially because women novelists weren't taken seriously, but also because the content of their books was considered inappropriate for ladies to have written. They picked the most ambiguous first names possible and hoped for the best. When Jane Eyre became a bestseller in 1847, literary London was fascinated by the mysterious Currer Bell. Some critics suspected the novel was too passionate and psychologically penetrating to have been written by a man. Others thought it was too knowledgeable about women's inner lives to have been written by a woman. The literary establishment basically tied itself in knots trying to figure out who could have possibly written such a book answer. A tiny woman from Yorkshire who was mining her own business. Charlotte and Anne eventually revealed their identities by traveling to London to meet their publishers. But Emily refused to give up her anonymity. She was too private, too uncomfortable with public attention to ever acknowledge the authorship of Wuthering heights during her lifetime. Emily's approach to fame was, thanks, I hate it, and she committed to that position completely. The story of the Brontë Sisters is ultimately a story of extraordinary achievement, shadowed by tragic loss. Branwell died in September, 1848. His constitution destroyed by years of alcohol and drug abuse. Emily caught a cold at his funeral and never recovered. She died of tuberculosis in December, 1848 just two months after her brother, and only a year after Wuthering Heights was published. She was only 30 years old. Emily refused all medical treatment, by the way, even dying, she was stubbornly independent. Anne died of tuberculosis in May, 1849 just a few months later, at the age of 29. She had gone to Scarborough with Charlotte, hoping the sea Air would help her recover, but it was too late. She's buried there far from the rest of her family because she was too ill to travel back to Haworth. Anne is the only Brontë not buried at home, which feels particularly poignant. Within eight months, Charlotte had lost her brother. And both her sisters, she was suddenly alone at Haworth parsonage with only her elderly father for company. Imagine losing your entire writing group, your best friends, and your siblings all in less than a year. Charlotte lived for six more years, long enough to see Jane Eyre and her subsequent novels achieve great success. She married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nichols in 1854, but died in early pregnancy in March, 1855 at the age of 38 years old. Patrick Brontë outlived all his children. He died in 1861 at the age of 84, having spent the last six years of his life alone in the parsonage where his extraordinary family had created their literary revolution. Patrick buried his wife and all six of his children. The resilience that required is almost unimaginable. What makes their story so poignant is how brief their literary careers were. Emily published only one novel, Anne published two, Charlotte published four, but her entire writing career lasted less than 10 years, and yet in that brief time, they changed English literature forever. They showed that women could write about passion, violence, psychological complexity. They proved that provincial, isolated lives could produce art of universal significance. If you remember from last week, this is exactly what Jane Austen did that was so revolutionary. The Brontë sisters demonstrated that the most powerful voices often come from the margins rather than the center of society. If today's journey to Haworth parsonage has sparked your curiosity about the Brontë sisters, and their extraordinary lives, I've got some wonderful book recommendations to deepen your understanding. For understanding their lives. Julet Barkers,"The Brontës" is the definitive biography, over 900 pages that covers every aspect of their lives and work. It's comprehensive, but never dry. Bringing their world to vivid life. Yes, it's massive, but these were people who wrote thousands of pages of childhood fantasy stories, so they deserve a massive biography. For historical fiction, Juliet Gael's"Romancing Miss Brontë" is a beautiful blend of biography and fiction that brings Charlotte's complicated love life to vivid reality. Don't let the title fool you. This isn't a bodice ripper. It's an honest exploration of Charlotte's unrequited passion for her married Brussels professor, her attraction to her London publisher and her ultimate marriage to Arthur Bell Nichols. Gael respects the historical record while bringing real emotional depth, and she does something wonderful by fleshing out Arthur into an actual person rather than just a footnote. It's meticulously researched but never dry. And it's a beautiful reminder that Charlotte at least knew some happiness, even if heartbreakingly brief. For their childhood and creative development. Christine Alexanders, the early writings of Charlotte Brontë explores the Angria and Gondal Chronicles and shows how their childhood fantasy shaped their mature work. And for something really different, John Green's,"Everything is Tuberculosis" is a fascinating read about how you can tie almost anything in life to tuberculosis. He includes the Brontë sisters in his book. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to the Wild Yorkshire moors and into the extraordinary world of the Brontë Sisters. I hope I've conveyed something of how their isolation and tragedy transformed into literary genius that continues to captivate us today. Next week, we're staying with the Brontës. But focusing specifically on Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, we'll explore how Charlotte created one of literature's most compelling heroines, a plain poor governance who refuses to accept society's limitations and demands to be treated as an equal. We'll talk about secret wives and addicts mysterious fires, and why Rochester's literature's most problematic romantic hero who we somehow still can't help but love. We will see how Jane Ayer shocked Victorian readers with its passionate intensity and radical ideas about women's independence and why it remains one of the most influential novels ever written about the struggle between individual desire and social constraint. And if you've been moved by the story of these remarkable sisters, remember that you can visit the Haworth parsonage yourself, walk the moors they loved and see the tiny, handwritten books and stand in the rooms where they wrote their immortal novels. There's something mystical about experiencing their world firsthand, feeling the wind that inspired Wuthering Heights and seeing the landscapes that shape their extraordinary imaginations. You can find out more about walking in the Brontës' footsteps at TheBookClubTour.com. Or on Facebook or Instagram@thebookclubtour Well, my tea's getting cold, so until next time, keep reading and stay curious.