ABSTRACT

The Brontës’ first readers had no way of knowing that the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey were, in addition to being talented writers, also committed practitioners of music and the visual arts. Charlotte Brontë made no mention of her sisters’ or her own artistic interests in the prefatory material she prepared for her own novels and for the 1850 one-volume edition of Anne and Emily’s works.1 Nor could the Brontës’ contemporaries have guessed that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell possessed a fourth sibling who had attempted, albeit without success, a career as a professional portraitist. Not until the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 did it become generally known that these literary women had also sought outlets for expression, and in some cases had ambition, in other artistic realms.2 Later Victorian biographers, notably Francis A. Leyland, expanded on Gaskell’s account of the family’s artistic training, with the result that the siblings’ solitary efforts at the easel and the piano eventually became a significant, if subordinate, component of what Lucasta Miller has recently termed “the Brontë myth.”3