Maria Branwell Brontë
The Mother's Ghostly Presence
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This is the second part in my Literary Mothers series, looking at the mothers of our most celebrated literary figures, the mother-daughter dyad, and their representations in art and writing.
In these longform essays, I delve deeper into the lives and influence of the mothers who raised some of our most cherished literary women, exploring their own lives and their impact on their daughters’ work. Through curiosity and exploration of the mothers who raised them, these explorations reveal the pleasure, the pain, and the importance of the mother-daughter relationship, as well as the writing they inspired.
Born 15th April 1783 in Penzance, a town in Cornwall on the South coast of England, Maria Branwell’s family counted amongst its ranks writers, bankers, scientists, merchants, builders, landowners, and miners, with one of her female cousins, Elizabeth Catherine Thomas Carne collecting, studying, and classifying minerals, leading her to become the first female member of the Royal Geological Society.
Unlike Maria’s children who would grow up with a connection to the Yorkshire moors, Maria Branwell’s childhood bedroom had a view of the sea, with the home itself containing the recycled timber of ships. Her parents, Anne and Thomas Branwell, birthed eleven children, with five dying before the age of five. The family adopted the practice of naming newborns after their deceased children, something which Maria’s future daughter Emily later adopted in her novel, Wuthering Heights, when Mr Earnshaw finds a young orphan on the streets and names him Heathcliff, for a lost son.
As with her future daughters, Maria and her four surviving sisters became the best of friends.
When, in 1792, her eldest sister Anne died at the age of twenty-three, Maria was left devastated, and her nineteen-year-old sister Jane took Anne’s name henceforth. (The confusing practice of the sharing of birth names is something which also surfaces in Emily’s novel, often leading to confusion for the reader). This particular sister married a Methodist minister who was subsequently caught in ‘vile…improper behaviour’ with two young men, leading to expulsion from his ministry, leading Jane/Anne and himself to emigrate to Baltimore in the US with their four young children, only for Jane/Anne to return to Penzance with a fifth child (leaving behind the first four) to live back with her family. Anne perhaps had this in mind in her creating of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and we can only imagine how such family stories might have fed into the Brontë siblings’ writing.
Maria Branwell was also a writer.
That is, as Deborah Lutz points out in her new biography of Emily Brontë, This Dark Night, she would have been if she hadn’t been required to put her full energy into her marriage, children and religion; requirements that were part and parcel of a mother at the time. Maria and Patrick Brontë met, married, and had six children within the time span of just eight years. Previously, Maria had written poetry and magazine articles, though only one of these still survives, a religious essay she did not publish, railing against the injustices of the rich. With pregnancy and childcare, as well as likely the role of a curate’s wife keeping her occupied, she did not continue to write. But some of her creative talent can be seen through the remaining letters to her then-fiancé Patrick, which show both her literary skills and an independent streak:
‘For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever…’
As Lutz illustrates, this sentiment appears to fit with Maria’s third daughter Charlotte’s eventual characterisation of the independently-minded Jane Eyre, together with both Helen Huntingdon and Agnes Grey, her youngest child Anne’s creations, from her two novels. Emily meanwhile would continue to take tales from her mother’s childhood and utilise them in her writing, not least the atmosphere of her novel Wuthering Heights, which is set between 1757 and 1803, the lifespan of her grandparents and the youth of both Maria and Patrick Brontë. This makes sense, as the siblings continued to pore over their mother’s letters after her death.
Despite Maria’s independent streak, she confesses in the above mentioned letter that she has ‘deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor,’ and feels that Patrick is to fill such a role in her life. Despite this, Lutz asserts that Maria continued to be the clever one in the marriage, regularly consulted by her own children, her friends and the wider townsfolk in Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the family later settled.
From an early age, Maria was a reader amongst readers within her large family, discovering the women’s rights movement likely through the protofeminist work of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Published in 1792, and residing at the libraries of which Maria was a member, Wollstonecraft’s text demanded serious and rational education for women, to allow them to obtain more fulfilling and beneficial occupations outside of the home. Maria’s Wesleyan Methodist Church was, as Lutz puts it, ‘in the vanguard of the movement,’ in its support of the vocations for women preachers.
But Maria was also a fan of the sensational Gothic literature of the time, being a member of the Penzance Ladies Book Club, for which she paid a subscription fee. This library held many of the popular novels of the era, including Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Maria also collected issues of The Ladies Magazine, which contained Gothic stories, as well as The Methodist Magazine, housing tales of dramatic struggles with the devil. It isn’t difficult from such readings to see where her daughter Emily adopted her taste for dark stories from beyond the grave.
Before meeting her future husband Patrick Brontë, Maria would have been considered a fairly elderly spinster at the age of twenty-nine, something Charlotte would later write about with some disdain in her novels. But marrying at an older age wasn’t altogether unusual in the Branwell family: Maria’s Aunt Jane (yes - another Jane!) had married at the age of thirty-seven to a younger man, John Fennell, aged twenty-eight. When he became headmaster for a boys’ school in Bradford in 1812, Aunt Jane became the governess of the large household and, feeling overwhelmed, wrote to Maria requesting her help. Maria, looking at the opportunity as an adventure, travelled the four-hundred-mile trip alone, taking over a week to arrive. There, she met with her cousin (you guessed it - Jane!!) who had been a lifelong friend, and who had recently become engaged to a clergyman, William Morgan, a close friend of Patrick.
In June 1812, Patrick walked the twelve miles from Leeds, where he was minister of St Peter’s Church, to dine with William and Jane. There, he met with Maria for the first time. At thirty-five years of age, Patrick was a handsome, athletic Irishman, tall to Maria’s small stature, whom she must have been impressed by, as following this first meeting, many letters passed back and forth, often delivered by friends and family. In her letters, Maria addressed him as ‘Dear Saucy Pat,’ and in one, brazenly stated: ‘I freely declare I love you above all the world besides.’
Within the year, Maria and Patrick were married.
From early in his youth, Patrick also had dreams of becoming a writer. Born in County Down, Ireland on 17th March 1777, Patrick was one of ten children who loved to read and to learn, something he would go on to pass onto all of his own children. In 1811, he published Cottage Poems, stating in the preface that he loved to write all day and night, when not occupied by his clerical duties. Following Cottage Poems, Patrick went on to publish more poetry, fiction, essays, articles and pamphlets. Although he was later forced by the necessity of work, his six children, and his ensuing grief to give up much of his writing, he continued to write occasional pieces.
As Deborah Lutz suggests, Maria and Patrick’s wedding day was like something from a novel of one of their contemporaries, Jane Austen, in that they arranged a triple marriage. On 29th December 1812, Patrick’s good friend William Morgan married Maria and Patrick, followed by Patrick marrying William to Jane Fennell, Maria’s cousin, with both Maria and Jane being bridesmaids for one another. Following this, Maria’s younger sister Charlotte married her cousin Joseph in Penzance.
Lutz points out that Maria and Patrick were mismatched on the social scale, with Maria from a higher social class, though this didn’t appear to be an objection at the time. This would be something that all three of the writing Brontë sisters would later contemplate through their fictional novels, including Wuthering Heights, with women from well-to-do families falling for orphans; Agnes Grey containing a squire’s daughter who married beneath her; and with the mother of Jane Eyre, who is disowned when she chooses to marry a poor clergyman.
Initially residing at Clough House, close to Patrick’s church, the couple appear to have settled into marriage well, with Patrick composing a poem for his wife’s thirtieth birthday, which references the “mutual joy” the couple shared.
Children shortly followed the couple’s union, with their first daughter, Maria, born in 1814, and Elizabeth in 1815. Shortly following Elizabeth’s birth, Patrick exchanged livings with another clergyman, which was worth twice his current curacy. This took the young family to Thornton, near Bradford, where William and Jane Morgan lived. The couple became fully engaged in the social milieu of the town, including a friendship with Elizabeth Firth, a wealthy woman who owned Kipping House, a seventeenth-century estate. Lutz believes that Elizabeth and Maria may have shared an interest in the work of the intellectual bluestockings, the name given to educated, intellectual women of the eighteenth-century. Led by figures such as Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, the Blue Stockings Society became an English literary circle, with these educated intellectuals engaging in serious conversation.
After a request from the family, Maria’s older sister, also called Elizabeth, made the arduous trip north from Penzance to help with the young family. Both Elizabeths became godmothers for the two Brontë children, and all three women became close, visiting with one another in the evenings, going for walks together and drinking tea. Together with Jane Morgan, the families dined together at Kipping House.
Lutz wonders at the time Maria had to spend in such social visits, given her other responsibilities, including pregnancies, recovery, childcare and her responsibilities as the wife of a clergyman, though the family did have the benefit of two young servant girls, Nancy and Sarah Garrs. Maria continued to birth more children, a child a year, beginning with Charlotte in 1816, Patrick Branwell (adopting his second name, Maria’s maiden name, throughout his life) in 1817. Emily and Anne followed in 1818 and 1820 respectively. With Maria now being almost thirty-seven, she would have been fairly old to have a baby, such was the low life expectancy of the era. Lutz wonders at the naming of Emily; all other names came from within the family (largely Maria’s), but there were no other recorded Emily’s on either side of the family. Emily was also the only daughter to be given the middle name of Jane. Born so close together, Emily and Anne became devoted sisters and best friends throughout their lives.
With six children, two parents, and the Garrs’ sisters, the small family home at Thornton was stretched beyond capacity. Patrick was offered the curacy of St Michael’s Church, Haworth, which came with a handsome parsonage house on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Although the smaller town meant that Maria was forced to end her daily visits with friends, which had been a source of contentment to her, the family decided to move their large, young family there, arriving three months after the birth of her their last child, Anne, in 1820. She was now the mother of six children under the age of seven, and though the parsonage at Haworth was bigger, it was still overcrowded. The sisters’ shared rooms and even beds (not uncommon in large families).
Sadly, not long after arriving in Haworth, a series of disasters unfolded for the Brontë family.
In January 1821, Maria fell suddenly and gravely ill. Examined by the doctor, she was pronounced to have terminal cancer, with little time left, and for the next seven months, her husband Patrick thought every day would be her last. Hiring a nurse for Maria, the young children were to be kept quiet so as not to disturb their mother, who remained in bed in severe pain. When she had better days, Maria sent for her children to see her before bed and to say their nightly prayers. During this time, Patrick watched his wife suffer and waste away, helpless to do anything, telling a friend that she sometimes gave way mentally, saying: ‘Oh God, my poor children.’ Patrick wrote to Penzance and asked if Maria’s older sister Elizabeth could return to help take care of the children. Now aged forty-five, Elizabeth once again travelled the four-hundred-mile journey north, arriving at the Parsonage in May, and rousing the circle of female friends from Thornton to assist the family. The two eldest siblings, Maria and Elizbaeth, were whisked off to Kipping House with Elizabeth Firth for a month.
Maria Branwell Brontë died at the parsonage at Haworth on 15th September 1821 aged thirty-eight. Her request that ‘all the dear faces should be about her’ was granted, meaning all her children were gathered around her bedside as she passed away. Emily and Anne were just three and two years of age respectively, and saw their mother’s painful exit. She was then, as was custom, laid out for seven days in her bedroom following her death.
Maria was interred inside a vault in St Michael’s, placed beneath the floor of the church rather than in the graveyard outside. This, Lutz points out, was deemed a great privilege, usually reserved for the prominent or wealthy, with the position inside the church, close to the altar, representing an even higher social rank. As the wife of the parson of St Michael’s, Maria occupied the privileged spot. Room was left inside the vault for other family members, something which the family would unfortunately require all too soon.
Patrick’s close friend William Morgan conducted Maria’s funeral on 22nd September, with the Brontë children taking part in the procession together with Maria’s sister Elizabeth, their Aunt Bramwell.
The hinterland between life and death was to haunt the writing of Emily in particular throughout her life.
Developing the idea of the death scene, through both her extensive poetry and her novel Wuthering Heights, with the idea of the return of spirits to the wild moors, Emily has Heathcliff attempt to dig up the coffin of the dead Catherine. He later tells the servant Nelly that he had just wanted to look upon his love’s face one more time:
‘I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again—it is hers yet—he had hard work to stir me;’
Wuthering Heights is littered with references to ghosts and death, and of raising the long-buried dead by the people who loved them. We see this most specifically in the ways in which Heathcliff mourns the dead but we also hear their ghosts on the moors, and the ghostly hand of the child, Catherine, which the visiting Mr Lockwood imagines he sees at the window, amongst many other references.
Emily’s poetry can similarly be mined for references to a dead mother. In ‘Encouragement,’ a poem which features a sister attempting to comfort a younger sibling, she says:
‘Remember still, she is not dead;
She sees us, sister, now;
Laid, where her angel spirit fled,
‘Mid heath and frozen snow.’ Encouragement - Emily Brontë
Even on Sundays, listening to their father’s sermons in church, the Brontë children would take their place in the family pew at the side of the altar, sitting atop the tombstones which held their mother.
Despite or because of their terrible loss, the siblings grew closer to one another, with the eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, becoming surrogate mothers alongside Aunt Bramwell. The Garrs’ sisters also provided essential help in keeping the home running for Patrick in his deep loss. Establishing a routine for his children, Patrick would meet them in his study in the mornings for prayers, followed by breakfast across the hall. They would then take their lessons, followed by sewing and mending, and walking on the moors, which Sarah Garrs reported brought great joy and laughter. At tea, the siblings would meet back with their father for ‘recitation and talk.’
Something quite remarkable about Patrick Brontë, for a man of his era, was his insistence of educating and encouraging his daughters. He nurtured his own love of the written word in all of his six children, allowing them the freedom to read and write, make their own booklets, and spend large quantities of time outside, rambling the moors. Unusually for the time, he did not confine these pastimes to his only son, Branwell.
It must also be mentioned in the story of Maria Branwell and her daughters the role her older sister Elizabeth played in the raising of Maria and Patrick’s young family. Aunt Bramwell stepped in to guide and care for her sisters’ six children, despite having no children of her own, nor ever marrying. Previous to her arrival in Haworth, she had led a fashionable life in Penzance, attending concerts, parties and the theatre regularly, leading a thriving social life. The insular nature of Haworth, on the edge of the often bleak Yorkshire moors, was a far cry from the life she had been living. Despite this, Aunt Branwell remained with her sister’s family for the rest of her life. Patrick referenced her as bringing him great comfort, sharing in his grief and being an ‘affectionate mother to my children,’ and the young Branwell recalled her as the ‘guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood.’
Despite his terrible grief, at one point Patrick attempted to find a new mother for his children, writing to propose to the wealthy Elizabeth Firth; unsurprisingly she turned him down immediately, being so far above him socially. Patrick then tried a woman named Mary Burder, whom he had courted before Maria. As one can imagine, she was not impressed by his offer! He appeared to give up after these attempts, and settled down into widowhood, Aunt Branwell remaining the constant source of mothering for his brood.
Maria and Elizabeth, the oldest Brontë siblings at ages eight and seven, were the first to begin writing down their stores. Maria was particularly heralded for her fierce intelligence and appeared to continue her mother’s bluestocking ideas, adopting her practice of deep reading, something which she passed onto her younger siblings.
Sadly, it wasn’t long before tragedy struck the Brontë household again, with the death of Maria at age eleven after being sent home from the rigid schooling at Cowan Bridge, suffering from consumption. The much revered Maria became worshipped through the sisters’ later writing, particularly in the form of Helen in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. Only Anne of the sisters’ was at home when Maria died, the other three being away at school, and she attended her sister’s funeral with Branwell, Patrick and Aunt Branwell. The Brontë vault was re-opened and Maria was placed with the mother who shared her name. This disaster was followed closely when Elizabeth also fell ill with consumption in the same month as her sister’s death. Charlotte and Emily returned home soon after, in time to see Elizabeth die a month later, aged ten, and placed with mother and sister in the family vault.
Who knows what literature may have been produced by the two eldest Brontë siblings, had they not succumbed so early. Maria in particular was said to possess a great deal of intelligence and aptitude, as well as being highly skilled at needlework for her young age.
My earlier essay examining the life of Aurelia Plath and the role she played in the writing life of her daughter, Sylvia, holds a different significance when we consider the writing of the Brontës.
What interested me here were the ways in which Maria’s early death affected her daughters, particularly seen in the writing of Emily. But also, and perhaps more importantly, how the siblings were inspired by their mother’s life.
Through Deborah Lutz’s biography and her extensive research, it was a delight to discover that Maria was an independent thinker. That she possessed radical ideas about the unfairness of society and that she was regularly called upon for her intellect and guidance from not just her friends and family, but those with whom she came into contact. That she was interested in the Bluestockings and the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft; a keen reader and member of the local libraries; and even a writer herself.
I also wanted to celebrate the love and support of her older sister, Elizabeth Branwell, who, for me, became something of the hero of this piece: she stepped in, despite the hardships, to raise her sisters’ children, something which I know from experience many aunts and uncles have done throughout history. This was true in my own mother’s large family of siblings, and, following the loss of my mother, it was to her sisters’ that I found the deepest connection to her memory.
Maria’s story is a story of women.
Sisterly love flows from the history of both Maria and her daughters’ lives and words, as well as the importance of a tribe of women supporting one another, through friends and relations alike. Though the loss of a mother could have broken the spirit of the Brontë siblings, it appears to have fed into their writing and life, leaving behind the legacy we are still as infatuated with, almost two centuries on.
I’ve always loved the story of Patrick and Maria! It’s so beautiful and sad! Great post :)
Thanks for this interesting and informative post. The story of the Brontes is always fascinating.