Anne Brontë
English novelist and poet
Years: 1820 - 1849
Anne Brontë (January 17, 1820 – May 28, 1849) is an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.
The daughter of Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England, Anne Brontë lives most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors.
She also attends a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837.
At nineteen she leaves Haworth and worksas a governess between 1839 and 1845.
After leaving her teaching position, she fulfills her literary ambitions.
She publishes a volume of poetry with her sisters (Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846) and two novels.
Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, is published in 1847.
Her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appears in 1848.
Like her poems, both her novels are first published under the masculine pen name of Acton Bell.
Anne's life is cut short when she dies of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine.
Partly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne's death, she is not as well known as her sisters.
However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature.
