Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 22

Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

STATION 4YA’s talk "The Beginning of the Brontes" covered a greater field than its title indicated. It is just 100 years ago that the poems of three new authors appeared, and as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell ghe Brontes made a first appearance in print. It was from this point that the speaker took up his subject, and in tracing the ultimate destiny of the members of the Bronte family, dealt with every aspect of their lives and deaths. What I had expected to hear more of, judging merely by the title of the talk, was the early writings of the childrea who inhabited that nowfamous parsonage at Haworth; those interminable scribblings of romances and verses which occupied so much of the time of the young people for many years before they appeared in print. (Charlotte, as mentioned in this. talk, had written 22 volumes of manuscript in one year alone, before she was 14!) In these early writings, in which the three sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were incredibly prolific, must lie the seeds of that vision and imagination which inspired their novels. This talk was in many ways salutary, arguing against the sensational fomantic interpretation of the Brontes’ life, and pointing out something that seems to have escaped the attention of certain Bronte-worshippers-namely, that Haworth, far from being a wild and lonely desolation of a plece, is a fairly populous town only a few miles from Bradford.