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The Brontës and The Aftermath
- Annika Nori Ahlgrim
- Oct 4
- 6 min read
I had a picture book when I was little called "The Brontës". It showed snapshots of what growing up a Brontë was like. They lived on the moors. This is a theme within the stories I like best. They lived in a parsonage because their father was a clergyman. They were "home-schooled" and much of their days were spent outside with their many animal pets. Emily Brontë had a hawk, according to the picture book. They played with Branwell's toy soldiers, starting long wars lasting days involving many rooms of their house. These wars danced on to pages and pages of tiny books in which the Brontë children documented their childhood tales. Those childhood dramas spun themselves into a fantastical world called Verdopolis where complicated political and social dramas played out. I knew that Branwell tried to be a successful artist in many mediums, but died instead. That was what I learned from that picture book when I was young.
I have since read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so I know some of each sister. Those books have informed parts of my inner world and challenge pre-conceived notions about what was possible for a woman at that time. While Cathy tragically doesn’t survive her circumstances, Jane and Helen take matters into their own hands, creating lives for themselves. This in some way mirrors the lives of the Brontë sisters, themselves: Emily doesn’t survive her circumstances, dying first, while Anne creates a simple life as a governess, though she remains unmarried, and Charlotte tried her best to lead her sisters into breaking into the British publishing scene in the 1840s and 50s. They first publish their books under pen-names: Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell, maintaining their initials while taking on male prenoms.
Of English literary history in the 19th century, I think the women who stir me the most are the Brontës. I noticed that they do not appear in the Novelists or Poets sections on the Google Gemini list of women writers of the 19th century, although they all were both. They appear at the bottom of the “Other Notable Women Writers”, clumped up together as if they were not independently talented and inspirational in their work and life. Although perhaps less famous than their predecessors Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, their work brings us alternate perspectives of what it means to be a woman in society. In Austen, we find women living within the constraints of Regency Society, a forever fascinating era mythologizing love-matches, romantic gestures and men wading out of lakes. Mary Shelley is of a category unto herself in ingenuity: she birthed Science Fiction with her novel Frankenstein.
The Brontës find their voices not with romance and marriages, but in the Aftermath. The Aftermath of a romance or marriage is a time of great upheaval for a person’s life. By representing the Aftermaths of regular women trying to eke out a life of which they can be proud, they not only show us the other side of the coin, but also a view into the practicality of what it means to be women in a society formed by men.
Jane secures herself a position all by herself at Thornfield as a governess at the beginning of her book. We witness her fascination, crush and eventual love for Rochester, a mysterious older man who is already in the Aftermath of his own love story - the one with Bertha. After the almost-marriage, Jane’s world cracks open. Jane slowly establishes herself as a teacher at the local village school, where she insists on teaching both boys and girls. Jane finds herself in her Aftermath: she focuses on herself, she builds her career, showing us her ambition and strength. After she has built her independence and self-worth, she does return to Thornfield to find the Hall burnt to the ground by Bertha, who died in the blaze, and Rochester blind. She marries him, but only after creating a life of which she could feel proud. Jane showed me a remarkable resilience: the Aftermath is important and defining. She taught me that I am in charge of my own life and I can make it what I want if I spend time cultivating it.
Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a mother experiencing her Aftermath. Helen doesn’t and can’t rent the entire Hall. Instead, she creates a home for her and her child in an apartment of the building. This in itself was a very evocative idea for me. The rest of the house is lightless, white dust-blankets looming in oblong shapes in the dark - this is what surrounds this woman’s small home in this grand building. She seems to be surrounded on all sides by the shadows of her past. The most remarkable aspect of this story is the depiction of the abusive husband. Now, we can see abusive husbands portrayed everywhere, but then, challenging the men in your life and leaving those men in your life meant giving up your personhood, in a way. Anne had to be careful when she created Helen because she was showing a side of life and an Aftermath that society, at that time, strove to erase: a woman’s personhood. Her work on this novel was condemned when it was published. It could give women of the day ideas and a voice in regards to speaking or acting out against the men in their lives. This begs the question, “What is so dangerous about a woman who thinks?”
In Wuthering Heights, Emily shows us an Aftermath of a love story, a haunted, possessive man contrives a marriage between his son and Cathy’s daughter, a twisted final joining of himself and his dead Cathy. Emily’s second-hand portrayal of love and fate in Wuthering Heights stands in stark contrast to Anne and Charlotte’s stories of women. Emily’s women are trapped while Anne and Charlotte’s create their own freedom. It is hard to find the lessons in Emily’s writing, and perhaps that is the point: life does not come with ready-made lessons. Emily might have felt alien to her family; contemporary readers and critics sometimes interpret Emily’s reclusiveness and hyperfocus as neurodivergence, though this remains speculative; and she was the tallest of her sisters. These are parts of herself that would have colored perceptions and treatment of her in Haworth, the village in which she grew up. Her life was spent living in her father’s parsonage, isolated and forever exploring the moors behind their home. She was an imaginatrix who spent her days developing Verdopolis, writing poetry for herself and being alone. She may have felt trapped herself in a society not built for someone as creative and odd as her, only finding freedom out on the moors like her Cathy. Emily’s life seems to speak more to individualism than societal expectations and control, although that does not mean she was not controlled. She was trapped in a box shaped by years of patriarchy. She felt confined and left society behind on the moors and through her writings. She teaches us more than Cathy does about what it means to be an individual in society. We do not know about her Aftermaths the way we know about Charlotte’s and Anne’s, but Emily did make a life that was entirely her own, despite the patriarchal structures in place.
The Brontë sisters did, indeed, make lives for themselves. They secured jobs as governesses, they wrote their masterpieces gathered around the table in their front room. Emily died and then Anne died and then Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s curate. She became pregnant soon after and died of complications from the pregnancy. Within her lifetime, Charlotte managed to convince their publishers to publish their books under their real names. Together, the Brontë women created a body of work both ahead of its time and a product of their time. The women in their stories strive to carve out a space for themselves in the world, independently of men. They show us that there was a conversation about women’s roles in society almost two centuries ago and that women struggled to be allowed to use their voices - building not just an Aftermath, but a life in which they could take pride.
In today’s society, the life of a woman is still dictated by precedent, and the misanthropic need for control. No matter the guise, restrictions on reproductive health, the stunted growth of The Equality Act, the centuries of male-dominated published materials, are all forms of control. A woman who can publish under her own name, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of publishing. According to economist Joel Waldfogel, women published more books than men for the first time in 2020. It was only five years ago that women took the lead. There are a surprising number of women authors who were disregarded for centuries, maligned and shamed for stepping past the boundaries of the societal acceptability defined by men. Despite the overwhelming evidence that a woman’s voice is becoming more mainstream, even the norm, I still see a woman with a voice and a story to tell as a radical being. Like the Brontës and their heroines, each woman who publishes today is still breaking centuries of silencing.
© 2025 Annika Nori Ahlgrim. All rights reserved.
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