Anne Brontë

Branwell Brontë died in September 1848 and Emily Brontë died less than three months later, both of tuberculosis, aggravated in Branwell's case by alcoholism and opiate addiction. By the following spring, their sister Anne was also dying of tuberculosis.

In one of the episodes that make it difficult to like Charlotte Brontë, she found numerous excuses why Anne's wish for a change of air and a trip to the sea should not happen. She kept saying she wanted to wait until Anne was stronger—In short I wish we could gain time and see how she gets on—while Anne was well aware that time was the one thing she didn't have. Charlotte even instructed her best friend, Ellen Nussey, how to respond when Anne wrote to her asking for her support.

When both Anne's doctor and their father, Patrick Brontë, said that they thought the trip was a good idea, Charlotte was forced to give in. Charlotte and Anne traveled to York with Ellen Nussey on Thursday, May 24, and spent the night there. Before leaving for Scarborough the following day, they stopped in York Minster, which Anne very much wanted to see again. Ellen Nussey wrote that as Anne looked up at the stonework, she said, “If finite power can do this what is the ...” before becoming too emotional to continue.

They arrived in Scarborough on Friday; Anne died on Monday. She's buried in a churchyard there instead of in the family vault in Haworth. I would have liked to visit her grave in Scarborough, but I couldn't face another train ride from York, or the steep climb up to the church on a cliff over the sea, but I did think about her when I was sitting in the Minster on that stifling hot day in York. I was glad that she got to experience that beauty again before she died. I was glad she got to go back to Scarborough, which she had visited many times when she was working as a governess, and had one more donkey cart ride on the beach.

This is the letter Anne wrote to Ellen Nussey on April 5. (Besides being a beautiful example of cross writing, a Victorian method of saving paper, I am amazed by her beautiful handwriting when she was so ill.)

But I have a more serious reason than this for my impatience of delay: the doctors say that change of air or removal to a better climate would hardly ever fail of success in consumptive cases if the remedy were taken in time, but the reason why there are so many disappointments is, that it is generally deferred till it is too late. . . . I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect, in the hope that you, dear Miss Nussy, would give as much of your company as you possibly could to Charlotte and be a sister to her in my stead. But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.

She was twenty-nine years old.