The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef Read Free Book Online

from the pulpit. His wife, Lydia Robinson, was dark haired and full of life.
    Branwell, too, tried again to make his way in the world. In autumn 1840 he went to work for the Leeds and Manchester Railway. He was assigned to the station in Sowerby, a bustling textile-manufacturing town near Halifax. The station was brand-new, and the railroad line would not be complete until work finished on the 1.6-mile Summit Tunnel, which runs beneath the Pennine Mountains of northern England. Then the longest railroad tunnel in the world, the Summit Tunnel represented speed and progress.
    As an assistant clerk, Branwell kept a record of the trains that stopped at the Sowerby station and the freight they carried. He also looked out for passengers’ safety. Charlotte thought that this low-level job was beneath her brother’s ability, but railroads were expanding, and Branwell looked forward to being promoted. Indeed, after six months he rose to clerk-in-charge of the Luddendenfoot Station and received a raise.
    At this time Branwell befriended Francis Grundy, a young man he could impress with his knowledge and talent. Grundy described Branwell as “small and thin of person”and “the reverse of attractive at first sight.” Branwell “had a mass of red hair, which he wore high off his forehead—to help his height, I fancy; a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep sunk, and still further hidden by the never removed spectacles.”
    Then, as always happened with Branwell, something went wrong. In March 1842, the railroad’s auditors looked at his account books and discovered that money was missing. Branwell had lost more than eleven pounds, a little more than he earned in a month. No one accused him of stealing the money, but it had been his job to keep track of it, so Branwell was fired once more.

four
“Who Ever Rose . . . Without Ambition?”
    S HORTLY before Branwell moved to Luddendenfoot, Charlotte tried once more to be a governess. She worked for the family of a merchant named John White, teaching and caring for a girl and boy, ages eight and six. She still had mounds of sewing to do, but the White children behaved better than the young Sidgwicks had. Their parents treated Charlotte kindly, giving her time off to visit Ellen and offering to let her father spend time at their home. They even said yes when Charlotte asked to extend her summer holiday from one week to three.
    None of this mattered to Charlotte, who had made up her mind to hate her new job. “No one but myself can tellhow hard a governess’s work is to me,” she declared, “for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are to employment.”
    That summer, when Anne and Charlotte spent their holidays at home, the sisters devised a plan to free themselves from working for others. As Emily wrote in a diary paper on her twenty-third birthday, “A scheme is at present in agitationfor setting us up in a school of our own.” Aunt Branwell was to lend her nieces money to rent a building and equip it as a school for girls. Miss Wooler even offered to let them take over the school at Dewsbury Moor, which would lower the cost of starting up.
    On the same day that Emily wrote her diary paper, Anne wondered “what will be our conditionand how or where shall we all be on this day four years hence.” Emily, thinking along the same lines, imagined the sisters “all merrily seatedin our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary.”
    Then Charlotte found a better way to use some of Aunt Branwell’s money. Her unconventional friend, Mary Taylor, was studying with her sister, Martha, in Brussels, Belgium, where their uncle Abraham lived. Mary urged Charlotte to do the same, but Charlotte needed little coaxing. Here was a chance to travel, to live far from home amid new sights and faces. Here was an opportunity to learn! With luck, the teachers in Brussels