Emily Bronte

1

SMILING CHILD

Tell me, tell me, smiling child,

What the past is like to thee?

An Autumn evening soft and mild,

With a wind that sighs mournfully.

Tell me, what is the present hour?

A green and flowery spray,

Where a young bird sits gathering its power,

To mount and fly away.

And what is the future, happy one?

A sea beneath a cloudless sun,

A mighty, glorious, dazzling sea,

Stretching into infinity.

('Past, Present, Future', dated 14 November 1839)

E MILY BRONTË WAS 21 years old when she wrote her short poem 'Past, Present, Future'. She was not yet the genius who would write Wuthering Heights, but her verse already showed many of the themes that would dominate her writing: a yearning for the past, the supremacy of nature, and visions of the future, visions of death and the eternity to follow.

Emily writes of the past as a smiling infant, but this is not any child - it is a remembrance of herself. When we think of Emily Brontë today we think of an insular yet powerful woman, one whose might with a pen belied her timidity in real life. It is easy to think of Emily as downcast, morose even, but while these terms may indeed be applicable to some of Emily's life, they do not apply to the whole of her thirty-year existence. In her infancy, Emily was a smiling, happy child, a pretty girl doted upon by a loving family. It was an idyllic beginning full of promise, and one looked back upon fondly by Emily in the opening lines of her poem.

Thornton is a village around 4 miles from the city of Bradford, in what is now the county of West Yorkshire. It is surrounded to the south by moorland, and one property with a perfect view of the moors was Kipping House. The large and elegant house was home to the Firth family, heads of Thornton society and with the money to enjoy a life that most of the village's inhabitants could only dream of.

The head of the household was John Firth, the village doctor. His first wife died in 1814 after a tragic accident that saw her thrown from a horse, but in 1815 he married his second wife, Anne. Also at the house was John's daughter, Elizabeth, and she kept a diary detailing dinner parties, social gatherings, shopping trips, charitable work and more. It is in this diary, in an entry dated 30 July 1818, that the 21-year-old Elizabeth writes, 'Mrs J. Horsfall called. Emily Jane Brontë was born.'1 This is the first record of Emily Brontë in print, but of course it was far from the last. Elizabeth Firth was to become an influential figure in the lives of the Brontës: a friend to Emily's parents, a benefactor at times of need, godmother to Anne, and, as we shall see, a potential stepmother to the Brontë siblings.

Emily and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, are to many the Queens of Yorkshire, and indeed they bring tourists from across the world, flocking to one particular western outpost of the county. They are also often thought of as being prim and proper examples of Victorian womanhood, but while this description may be applied to Charlotte Brontë, and to an extent Anne, although she was more willing to challenge the values of Victorian society within her writing, it could never be a description of the free-spirited and independent-minded Emily.

We need to go back a little further to get an idea of where Emily's belligerence and rebelliousness come from. To discover Emily's roots, and the beginnings of the Brontë family as a whole, we have to leave the churchyards of Yorkshire behind and look in upon an eighteenth-century elopement on the banks of the River Boyne. Emily's father, Patrick Brontë, was a priest in the Church of England; it was a highly respectable position, if not necessarily a lucrative one, but of course he was neither born in England nor with the surname Brontë. The story is well known of how Patrick changed his surname to Brontë from the Irish Brunty, or perhaps Prunty, upon his arrival at St John's College, Cambridge University, in 1802.2 The change in name was eventually adopted by his family in Ireland as well, including Emily's grandfather, Hugh, who shared many characteristics in common with her.

Hugh Brunty's story is unclear, even confusing, at many points, with associated legends that are now impossible to prove or disprove - obscured by the mists of time, and the sparsity of written records in eighteenth-century Ireland. Perhaps the most enduring myth, or possibly truth, about Hugh was that he was raised not by a Brunty at all, but by a cuckoo in the nest who had been brought from Liverpool - much like Heathcliff in Emily's great novel. This account was brought to light by a late nineteenth-century treatise, The Brontës in Ireland by Dr William Wright. Wright based his book upon eyewitness accounts, and the stories of people who had known Patrick Brontë and his family, although it reads like an intoxicating mixture of fact and fiction, truths and half-remembered tales.

Patrick's great-grandfather was a farmer and cattle dealer near Drogheda in County Louth, in what is now the Republic of Ireland, and he often travelled to Liverpool to sell cattle at the burgeoning market there. One of Wright's sources recalled how the farmer came to adopt a helpless child:

On one of his return journeys from Liverpool a strange child was found in a bundle in the hold of the vessel. It was very young, very black, very dirty, and almost without clothing of any kind. No one on board knew whence it had come, and no one seemed to care what became of it. There was no doctor in the ship, and no woman except Mrs. Brontë, who had accompanied her husband to Liverpool. The child was thrown on the deck. Some one said, 'Toss it overboard'; but no one would touch it, and its cries were distressing. From sheer pity Mrs. Brontë was obliged to succour the abandoned infant . When the little foundling was carried up out of the hold of the vessel, it was supposed to be a Welsh child on account of its colour. It might doubtless have laid claim to a more Oriental descent, but when it became a member of the Brontë family they called it 'Welsh'.3

The author goes on to describe how Welsh Brunty, as he was known, elopes and marries his master's daughter, Mary, in secret, and after being evicted wreaks revenge upon the family. Later he approaches one of his brothers-in-law and persuades him to let him adopt his son Hugh. Hugh is treated appallingly by Welsh, but eventually escapes and flees to the north of Ireland. This is supposedly the tale of the early years of Emily's grandfather, Hugh Brunty, later Brontë, and the account has obvious similarities to Wuthering Heights - but is this because it was made up by either Wright or his source, or because it was a family folktale that Emily knew and drew upon?

We get a rather different account of Hugh from Patrick himself. Writing to Elizabeth Gaskell as she prepared to commence her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Patrick stated:

He [Patrick's father, Hugh] was left an orphan at an early age. It was said that he was of ancient family . He came to the north of Ireland and made an early but suitable marriage. His pecuniary means were small - but renting a few acres of land, he and my mother by dint of application and industry managed to bring up a family of ten children in a respectable manner.4

One undisputed fact about Hugh was that he fell in love with Alice McClory from County Down. They wanted to marry, but there was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in their way - Hugh was a Protestant and Alice was a Catholic. They eloped, and after a clandestine marriage in Magherally Church they set up home in a two-roomed cottage near Emdale in the parish of Drumballyroney. The cottage in County Down can still be visited today and has become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans, as it was here, just a year after the wedding of Hugh and Alice, that their first son was born. Born on St Patrick's Day, 1777, he was named Patrick after the saint, and was to become patriarch of perhaps the most famous family in world literature.

Patrick, as he revealed in his letter to Mrs Gaskell, was the first of a large family and, recognising the financial burden upon his parents, he was determined to make his own way in life from an early age. They were, by necessity, a poor family, but hard working and one that was nourished with love. Patrick's younger sister Alice commented on this at the age of 95 in 1891: 'My father came originally from Drogheda. He was not very tall but purty stout; he was sandy-haired and my mother fair-haired. He was very fond to his children and worked to the last for them.'5

We also hear that Hugh Brunty was renowned as a wonderful storyteller, and it is likely to have been at Hugh's knee that Patrick developed his own love of stories and of books. It was this love of literature that changed his life forever. Patrick was training as a weaver, but one day a passing minister, Reverend Andrew Harshaw, heard the young boy reading aloud from Milton's Paradise Lost.6 So impressed was the priest that he offered to give Patrick free tuition at a school he ran.

Patrick proved himself such an able scholar that by the age of 16 he was master of his own school. His prodigious talents as a scholar and schoolmaster came to the attention of another Anglican priest, the Reverend Thomas Tighe of...