Meta & Louy are working hard at the dining-room table, mending your pink gown; but I don’t know whether they can get it done to send off before Monday, as it is so much torn; & then Caroline, who is as busy as can be with other things today, will have to iron it. (….) Caroline has on an atrocious print today, great stripes of crimson, blue & brown…elizabethgaskellhouse
This is a blog about the Bronte Sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. And their father Patrick, their mother Maria and their brother Branwell. About their pets, their friends, the parsonage (their house), Haworth the town in which they lived, the moors they loved so much, the Victorian era in which they lived.
zondag 30 juni 2019
Revealed: smuggling past of the Brontë sisters’ grandfather.
“No-one has ever connected the Brontës to Cornish smuggling before and this part of the family fortune is in startling contrast to the genteel life their mother and aunts lived amid Regency Penzance society.”
Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, described the evidence as “fascinating”, casting light on how Branwell’s legacy enabled his granddaughters to get published: “In effect, their books were vanity published,” she said. “They paid for the publication of their poems in 1846. Then Emily and Anne actually paid for their novels to be published. They couldn’t find a publisher who was willing to take on their publication. So they ended up financing it themselve.
She added: “Their mother’s sister, Elizabeth Branwell [who died in 1842], had a family annuity which she saved and left to her nieces, about £300 for each of them. That would have been quite a lot of money. As a governess, they might have earned £25 [a year] … It did enable them to pay for the publication of their works.”