Anne Brontë (January 17, 1820 – May 28, 1849) was a British novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. The daughter of a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England, Anne Brontë lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. For a couple of years she went to a boarding school. At the age of nineteen she left Haworth and worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. After leaving her teaching position, she fulfilled her literary ambitions. She wrote 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, was 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, appeared in 1848. Anne's life was cut short when she died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twenty nine.
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Charlotte Brontë provides a poignant introduction to her sister Anne's poems, reflecting on Anne's lifelong struggle with a heavy, pensive religious conscience. While Anne's piety often manifested as a sorrowful burden, Charlotte notes that she eventually found peace, transitioning from a fear of divine judgment to a steadfast hope in God's mercy during her final moments.
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNE BRONTÈ
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INTRODUCTION BY CHARLOTTE BRONTÈ
In looking over my sister Anne's papers,
I find mournful evidence that religious feeling had been for her,
but too much like what it was to Cowper.
I mean, of course, in a far milder form.
Without rendering her a prey to those horrors that defy concealment,
it subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness.
The pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes.
She ever waited at the foot of a secret sine eye,
listening in her heart to the voice of a trumpet,
sounding long and waxing louder.
Some, perhaps, would rejoice over these tokens of sincere,
though sorrowing, piety in a deceased relative.
I own, to me, they seem sad,
as if her whole innocent life had been passed
under the martyrdom of an unconfessed physical pain.
Their effect, indeed, would be too distressing,
were it not combated by the certain knowledge
that, in her last moments,
this tyranny of a too tender conscience was overcome.
This pomp of terrors broke up and,
passing away, left her dying hour unclouded.
Her belief in God did not, then, bring to her dread,
as of a stern judge,
but hope as in a creator and saviour.
And no faltering hope was it,
but a sure and steadfast conviction,
on which, in the rude passage from time to eternity,
she threw the weight of her human weakness,
and by which she was enabled to bear
what was to be borne patiently, serenely, victoriously.
End of introduction.
Read by Alan Mapstone.
