The Brontë Sisters
Creating From The Shadows
Creating From The Shadows is an initiative as part of Divine Feminine Fridays designed to illuminate a specific form of erasure: The subjugation of women's creative agency through structures of patriarchy embedded in the arts, sciences and letters. Rather than being a catalogue of victims, this is a pantheon of originators, thinkers, and makers whose work was hidden, redirected, or consumed by forces telling them they may create, but not as themselves.
The stories of these women are not united by genre or geography. Some painted, some theorized, some choreographed, composed, coded or edited. What unites them? There is a boundary placed between their mind and their voice: The line drawn says, “You may be brilliant, but invisible.”
Publishing under male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to bypass the prejudices against women writers, these three female authors gained entry into the literary world through their persistence in spite of being overshadowed by nineteenth century gender norms.
The Brontë Sisters
“The Selkie longs for her skin, not for escape, but for return—to the original voice, the unbroken name.”1
Biographical Context
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were born into the strict world of 19th-century Anglican rectory life—daughters of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman of Irish descent, and Maria Branwell, a refined and devout mother who died when the children were very young. Their religious upbringing was deeply shaped by the Evangelical Anglicanism of their father, which emphasized moral discipline, self-denial, and the dangers of imagination. The death of their mother, followed by the deaths of their two elder sisters, left them suspended between grief and spiritual scrutiny.
But it was the moors of Haworth destined to shape their inner worlds. The open, wind-swept Yorkshire landscape became more than a backdrop—it entered their consciousness and later their novels as a kind of sentient force. The moors offered a strange paradox: wildness within the confinement of duty. As girls, they created elaborate fantasy worlds—Angria, Gondal, Glass Town—each filled with power struggles, intrigue, and gothic grandeur. These were not idle games. They were the first manuscripts, many bound by hand, written by candlelight, and traded in secret.
Charlotte was 31 when Jane Eyre was published. Emily was only 29 when Wuthering Heights appeared. Anne, at 27, published Agnes Grey and shortly after, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These were not works of late-blooming maturity, but books forged by women who had been writing since girlhood—often more prolifically than their male peers.
The Patriarchal Puzzle
To publish, they first had to disappear. The sisters chose the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, each name subtly preserving their initials but erasing their gender. In 1846, they published a joint collection of poetry—Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—which sold only a few copies. But they persisted. When Jane Eyre gained attention in 1847, it did so under the guise of a male author. Reviewers admired the book’s boldness, its emotional clarity, its masculine power.
“We doubt not it will soon cease to be a secret; but on one assertion we are willing to risk our critical reputation—and that is, that no woman wrote it. This was our decided conviction at the first perusal, and a somewhat careful study of the work has strengthened it. No woman in all the annals of feminine celebrity ever wrote such a style, terse yet eloquent, and filled with energy bordering sometimes almost on rudeness: no woman ever conceived such masculine characters as those portrayed here.”2
—The Indicator, 1848.
That power, of course, came from a woman.
This act of veiling mirrors the Celtic legend of the Selkie—a seal-woman whose skin is stolen by a man, forcing her to live on land in human form. She remains silent, half-alive, until the skin is found again. Only then can she return to her true self.3 The Brontës' voices, too, were wrapped in false skins. To speak, they had to wear names not their own, and in doing so, lived a half-truth in public.
Emily never lived to see her work embraced. Anne’s most radical novel was suppressed—by Charlotte, who found its content too severe.4 Such it was, even in authorship, they policed themselves—compelled by the fear of rejection, or worse, ridicule.5
The Buried Brilliance
Their novels were not simply imaginative escapes; these were acts of resistance, critiques written under constraint. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte constructs a heroine who will not submit—who dares to say:
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”6
Their success did not unmask them immediately. Only after Emily and Anne died did Charlotte claim their authorship publicly, and even then, the myth of the solitary genius—Charlotte alone—began to form. Charlotte did live to see her work recognized, but often undercut by critics who viewed her prose as unfeminine, her heroines “too assertive,” her characters “too angry.” In their lifetimes, the Brontës wore masks to be seen. In death, their names were stitched together or pulled apart by literary fashion.
Emily’s Wuthering Heights shattered Victorian decorum. With a structure and emotional rawness unlike anything before, it was dismissed in her lifetime, only later recognized as a masterpiece of psychological complexity. Catherine Earnshaw is not moral, not domestic, not tame. Her cry—“I am Heathcliff!”—is both a love declaration and a refusal of divided selfhood.7 It was not feminine. It was elemental.
Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, one of the earliest feminist novels, dared to depict a woman leaving her alcoholic husband—a move so radical it was deemed socially dangerous. It was suppressed after her death by Charlotte herself, who feared it was “too coarse.” The main character of Helen Huntingdon writes, paints, and keeps her diary as a form of survival and female autonomy, against marital oppression.8
Each sister created a woman who resists containment, even when the culture demanded submission. Though they adopted male masks, they wrote as only women could—with intuition for repression, with stormy passion, and with sympathy for the small rebellions which generally would go unnoticed.
Return of the Selkie
The Selkie eventually finds her skin and vanishes back into the sea—not in sorrow, but in return to form.
“When a woman is too long gone from home, she is less and less able to propel herself forward in life. Instead of pulling in the harness of her choice, she is held back. She becomes dry, brittle, without inspiration. She becomes a stranger to herself, unsure of her direction. She forgets her own name. She forgets to swim.”9
We see the consequences of a woman being separated from her essential self—her "skin"—and the necessity of returning to reclaim her true nature, its vitality and purpose. The Brontës' journey of navigating societal constraints to express their authentic voices through literature aligns seamlessly. They never reclaimed their names fully in life. Yet, their work, once mistaken for men’s, has far outlived the disguise. They did not escape the patriarchy; they broke it open, from within its own forms.
Their heroines were not passive. Their landscapes were not polite. Their fiction was a cry through the veil of the shadows. Today, it is read with their names intact.
For our Thumbnail image we return to Haworth to visit the Parsonage, and the ominous town and landscape known as Brontë Country.
Introduction: A Public Reckoning with Silenced Genius
Part I: The Bronte Sisters
Part II: George Sand
Part III: Louisa May Alcott
Part IV: Hilma af Klint
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Sources—
Brontë, Charlotte. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. In Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, by Ellis and Acton Bell. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1848.
Brontë, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. London: Aylott and Jones, 1846.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994.
Alexander, Christine. "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell." In The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, edited by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, 110–112. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Davies, Stevie, ed. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
"The Sublimely Inaccurate Portrait of the Brontë Sisters." The New Yorker, September 18, 1995.
"Jane Eyre: Contemporary Critiques." The Sunday Times, March 14, 2003.
An original adaptation inspired by traditional Celtic folklore and feminist interpretations of the Selkie Myth.
"Jane Eyre: contemporary critiques." The Sunday Times, 14 March 2003.
This adaptation reimagines the traditional selkie myth, where the selkie's seal skin represents her true identity and autonomy. In many tales, the selkie's skin is stolen, forcing her into a life suppressing her true nature. The act of reclaiming her skin symbolizes a return to selfhood and liberation from imposed roles. This interpretation aligns with feminist readings viewing the selkie's journey as emblematic of women's struggle to reclaim their voices and identities within patriarchal societies.
Charlotte Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” in Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, by Ellis and Acton Bell (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), vii–xix.
In this biographical notice, Charlotte Brontë expressed her reservations about Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, stating that the choice of subject was a mistake and it was too coarse and revealing. As a result, she prevented its republication after Anne's death, effectively suppressing the novel for a time.
Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 837.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions, 1992), 252.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847), 100.
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 100–105.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 272.
Understandably so. As a visual artist, I've always been immensely proud of those early women painters who defied cultural constrictions and widened the world with their creative spirits.
Fascinating. Thank you!