Anne Bronte is the youngest of the Bronte sisters and she’s not one of my favourite writers. Some have claimed that she was more talented than her sisters but I can’t agree.
She was probably a little closer to Jane Austen in her style of writing… in that she did not give us scenes of passion and drama but concentrated on the quieter aspects of social life.
She was born in 1820 near Bradford, where her father was curate. Her mother had given birth to six children in about 6 years and when Anne was a baby, she died of what was probably uterine cancer. So Anne had no memory of her mother. The family had by then moved to Haworth where they were to live most of their lives. Her father was deeply grieved by the death of his wife and with his large family (He later called it a "small but sweet family") he felt the need of a new wife to look after them. However his attempts to remarry ended in failure as he was in many ways a man who was socially clumsy.. and he offended the lady that he proposed to. He seems to have then given up on trying to find a new wife and relied on his sister in law Elizabeth Branwell, to keep house and look after the children.
Aunt Branwell as she was known, was a strict woman with a sense of duty and the children respected her rather than loved her. Anne who was the quietest and most “normal” of the family, seems to have been her favourite.
Anne was too young to go to school at Cowan Bridge like the other children, so she stayed home and was educated there by her father, Miss Branwell and later a local art teacher. So she missed the tragic experience that Charlotte and Emily had had, of being at a school where the children were half starved and badly treated....
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