The best Brontë

Fans of the novels and poems written by the sibling inhabitants of Haworth Parsonage always have a Top Brontë. Fame-seeking Charlotte and mysteriously reclusive Emily usually grab the limelight. My father reread Emily’s only novel every five years, annotating his student copy of Wuthering Heights and monitoring his opinions depending on how his own love life was going. He shared his choice with the playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis, until the day she read Anne’s final letter, and was taken aback as its sudden significance ‘catches at my heart’, making her wonder about the less wowed, less known, youngest sister.

This wonderful biography begins at a disadvantage. All but five of Anne’s letters are missing. The surviving biographical facts can fit a single page. But Ellis’s first solution is to tell Anne’s story through the characters at the centre of her life. Chapters are devoted in turn to the children’s heroic mother, Maria; their selfless aunt; their bereft Reverend father; the controlling Charlotte; the uncompromisingly independent Emily; and their brother Branwell, who Charlotte says ‘thought of nothing but stunning (drugs) and drowning (drink) his distress of mind’, jointly provide a prism through which Ellis’s elusive protagonist emerges.

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Providing the reassuring plain-speaking in this extraordinary household is Tabby, the moor-rooted, emotionally indispensible housekeeper. But it is Anne’s quiet good sense and loyalty that at first dignifies and distinguishes her. The early fictional landscapes of Gondal, the children’s jointly imagined world, established a strong connection between Emily and Anne. At first overshadowed and overprotected by Charlotte, Anne earned her sisters’ respect when she took a job as a governess. Branwell’s affair with the wife of Anne’s employer had disastrous consequences, as disgraced brother and guilt-stricken sister returned home.