Anne Brontë, the last of the Brontë children, was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England on 17 January 1820. Meek and more religious-minded than Charlotte or Emily, little is known about her life compared to the lives of her more popular sisters.
The Brontë sisters like many women writers at the time published their poems and novels under male pen names so that their work might be taken seriously in the male-dominated literary world of the 19th century: they were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. ~ The Attagirls on Twitter
Anne Brontë: the radical sister overlooked by history
Anne's first novel was Agnes Grey (1847), based on her experience as a governess. It didn't get much attention, but her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), was an immediate success. She met with fierce criticism for her work despite its huge popularity.
The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, leaves her husband to protect their young son from his influence. She supports herself and her son by painting while living in hiding. In doing so, she violates social conventions and English law. At the time, a married woman had no independent legal existence apart from her husband.
Unlike her elder sisters, Anne Brontë did not follow the Romantic style in her two novels - opting instead for Realism. In the second printing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë responded to critics who said her portrayal of the husband was graphic and disturbing.
She wrote, "Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveler, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts - this whispering 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience."
"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."
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