This New Novel Explores the Secret Lives of the Other Two Brontë Siblings
When you write a novel, there’s one query you get very used to responding to: “What’s it about?” My answer sounds more like a question. “The Brontës?” I say, looking for a smile of recognition. This is often forthcoming from women, much more rarely from men. People tell me they love Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and ask if my book is about Charlotte or Emily. “Actually,” I tell them. “My main Brontë characters are the other two—Branwell and Anne.”
There were six Brontë children in all, born to an Irish father and a Cornish mother in rural Yorkshire in England, between 1814 and 1820. The eldest two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died as children, not long after the loss of their mother to cancer.
Branwell, the only boy, passed away aged 31, an alcoholic opium addict who’d failed to achieve the greatness his family believed him capable of. And the trio the world is most familiar with—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—produced some of the most lauded novels in English.
Charlotte wrote the most—four completed novels, including the famous Jane Eyre—and she lived longest. She was 38 when she died in the early stages of pregnancy, suffering from dehydration brought on hyperemesis gravidarum (yes, what Kate Middleton had). Emily has always enjoyed a cultish following, thanks to her stirring poetry and the violent passion of her one novel, Wuthering Heights.
But Anne, who wrote the quieter Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that shocked on its publication, has often been unfairly overlooked. It is a cruel irony that, with the Brontë Parsonage Museum celebrating the bicentenaries of the births of each of the siblings over the last few years, 2020, the year of Anne, has seen an unprecedented closure of the house due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
I had always loved the writings of all three Brontë sisters, and been fascinated by their strange romantic story—the litany of tragic deaths, the elaborate playworlds the siblings created together, and the fact that, as women writers, they chose to adopt male pen names, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. I studied for a Master’s in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Oxford, and Charlotte Brontë was one of the writers I focused on. But it was in 2016, when reading the first biography of Charlotte, published in 1857 by fellow Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, that I came across a new, tantalizing story about the Bronte family.
Like their characters Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey, Charlotte and Anne Brontë both worked as governesses, one of the few professions open to women of their class and education level. In May 1840, Anne took a position teaching the daughters of the Robinson family at Thorp Green Hall, a house near the villages of Great and Little Ouseburn. Branwell joined her a little under three years later to act as the son’s tutor.
It was here that he met the mistress of the household, Lydia Robinson, the woman Mrs. Gaskell eviscerates in a scathing section of her biography—and my novel, Brontë's Mistress, finds its inspiration.
Gaskell described Lydia as “profligate.” She wrote that this married woman in her forties had “tempted” twenty-five-year-old Branwell into engaging in an affair with her, and that “in this case the man became the victim.” She even suggested that Lydia was responsible for Branwell’s addictions and illness and, indirectly, his death and those of his celebrated sisters. So damning was the character assassination that Lydia threatened to sue Gaskell for libel, leading to her retraction of the allegations.
I was fascinated and began my research in a whirlwind. I knew that this was a story I had to write. What had really happened between Branwell and Lydia at Thorp Green Hall? What part had Anne played in any illicit romance? From the very beginning, I felt there was a novel here, one about a woman very different from Charlotte Brontë's protagonists, who are typically poor, plain, young and virginal. Lydia Robinson was wealthy, beautiful, older, and sexually experienced. But she was still a woman in the nineteenth century, and as such she had few choices open to her.
After my initial rush of inspiration, I used all the skills I’d developed through my academic studies to be methodical in my research. I read many Brontë biographies and journal articles. I created spreadsheets of all known dates in Lydia’s life and the lives of the Brontës. I consulted digitized census records to understand the servants who were part of the Thorp Green Hall household and the families they had back home. I corresponded with archivists to learn more about members of the York Medical Society, and librarians to track down poems by long-forgotten country curates. I may have been living in twenty-first century New York City, but for around a year I might as well have been living in 1840s Yorkshire.
When I finally began writing the novel, I held myself to a high standard of accuracy. We can never know for certain what historical figures thought, felt, or said to each other, but I wanted everything that happens in my novel to be something that could have happened.
Thinking myself into Lydia’s shoes meant imagining what it must have been like to have no access to divorce, few property rights, and an extremely limited education, focused only on making girls as attractive as possible to snare desirable mates. Lydia’s affair with Branwell, as I conceive of it, is the natural outcome of an age when women’s sexualities, like all their other desires, were ignored and repressed.
In one section of my book, Lydia talks about how few vices were open to women like her. She can’t gamble, hunt or ride horses for sport, like her husband; she didn’t spend her youth visiting prostitutes, like many of her male peers; and she can’t even choose when to drink alcohol, since her movements are so controlled.
What she finds with Branwell isn’t exactly happiness, but an outlet for her many frustrations, and, yes, it doesn’t hurt that he’s an attractive young man with a penchant for talking about art and poetry. It also meant bringing a modern lens to Branwell’s addictive behaviors, seeing his reliance on drink and opium as illnesses for which Lydia was certainly not to blame.
The "Author’s Note" at the end of the book lays out further evidence for why I characterized the affair in the way that I did, but it was also important for me to aim for veracity in the details. Much of the furniture mentioned is taken from an inventory made of the Thorp Green household. I know the specific date on which every single scene takes place. And I even deleted moonlight from a chapter when I realized that on that night there had been a new moon!
Once I had a draft of the novel, in the spring of 2018, I took a trip to Yorkshire to continue my research on the ground. I stayed in an outbuilding of the Great Ouseburn post office and traversed miles on foot to walk in the Brontës’ footsteps. Thorp Green Hall burned down in the late nineteenth century but I visited the site (now home to a school) and saw the Monk’s House, the cottage where Branwell Brontë once slept. I took tea in the front parlor of the house that once belonged to Dr. Crosby, a key character in my novel. I visited the graves of the Robinsons and their neighbors and friends.
And, of course, I went to Haworth, home of the Brontes, and consulted the so-called “Robinson papers,” all documents related to Thorp Green Hall in the Bronte Parsonage Museum collection. Seeing—touching—Lydia Robinson’s signature on 18 letters was a surreal moment. I’d been thinking myself into this woman’s brain for months and here she was on the page before me.
Until now, Lydia Robinson has been at most a footnote in the Brontës’ history, while Anne and Branwell have lived in their more famous sisters’ shadows. Mrs. Gaskell’s depiction of the affair has gone largely unchallenged and Lydia has been demonized, due to a gendered double standard that was more prevalent in the nineteenth century, but still exists to this day. My Lydia is far from perfect—she’s deeply flawed and has opinions and attitudes most readers will probably reject.
Yet my aim was always to approach my research with empathy. In Brontë’s Mistress, I cast a light on a woman forgotten by history. My novel is her story; it’s the story of Branwell and Anne, those “other” Brontës; and it’s the story of the secrets that bound all of them together.
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