| The Brontë Family is best known for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, famous English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. They were three of the six children of the Rev. Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria Branwell. They wrote under the pseudonym Bell (Currer, Ellis and Acton) and lived in Haworth, in the Southern Pennines (Yorkshire).
There were two other sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died in 1825 of tuberculosis, and a brother: the artist and writer Branwell Brontë.
In 1846, Charlotte, Emily and Anne published a book of poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, but it was not a hit, selling only two copies. They turned to novel writing, and Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were published.
On December 19, 1848, Emily died of tuberculosis, followed by Anne's death on May 24, 1849 from the same infection.
The Rev. Brontë, a native of County Down in Ulster, was the eldest son of Hugh Prunty, also known as Hugh Brunty, and changed the orthography of his last name several times during his lifetime, from Brunty to Branty to Bronte to Bronté to Brontë. The diaeresis over the final e indicates that it is pronounced rather than silent.
The spelling changes have been said to have been influenced by the classical figure Brontes, or by the gift of land in the town of Bronte, Sicily in 1799 from Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to Admiral Horatio Nelson.
The Rev. Brontë had no grandchildren and hence has no living descendants.
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