Abstract
Charlotte begins her last novel by talking of the Brettons of Bretton, figures of established position and sources of solid British comfort, to whom the friendless Lucy Snowe turns at moments of crisis, but to whose secure position she realises eventually that she cannot aspire. The Brontës were not Brontës of Brontë. Brontë is in fact the name of a place in Sicily which Lord Nelson took as part of his title when ennobled, and it was no doubt the connection with Lord Nelson, an obvious hero in the Brontë family, that led Charlotte’s father to adopt this name in place of the more humble Prunty under which he was born.
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Notes
E. Chitham, The Brontës’ Irish Background (London, 1986).
Mrs Ward’s preface to the Haworth edition of Wuthering Heights (London, 1899) stressing the Brontës’ Celtic origins clearly owes much to her uncle’s earlier vague racist theories, notably those expressed in M. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867).
D. Newsome, The Parting of Friends (London, 1966) gives the best explanation of this phenomenon.
J. Horsfall Turner (ed.), The Reverend Patrick Brontë, A.B.: His Collected Works and Life (Bingley, 1898).
Books on Mr Brontë, such as A. Hopkins, Father of the Brontës (Baltimore, 1958)
and J. Lock and W. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Brontë (London, 1965), are generally favourable to their subject, but a number of modern Brontë biographers have cast aspersions on him. Neither Mrs Gaskell nor Charlotte’s two friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor were fond of Charlotte’s father; this may be evidence against him, but it must also be a fact to bear in mind when weighing the evidence.
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© 1988 Tom Winnifrith
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Winnifrith, T. (1988). Origins. In: A New Life of Charlotte Brontë. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19215-1_2
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