The Brontë Story

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A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Tim Vicary.

On a September day in 1821, in the church of a Yorkshire village, a man and six children stood around a grave. They were burying a woman: the man’s wife, the children’s mother. The children were all very young, and within a few years the two oldest were dead, too.

Close to the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors, the father brought up his young family. Who had heard of the Brontës of Haworth then? Branwell died while he was still a young man, but the three sisters who were left had an extraordinary gift. They could write marvellous stories – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall… But Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë did not live to grow old or to enjoy their fame. Only their father was left, alone with his memories.

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Tim Vicary

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THE BRONTË STORY

Some people have a special talent, for music, or for drawing and painting, or for writing. No one knows where this talent comes from. Perhaps people are born with it; perhaps it comes from God. Or perhaps it is chance or luck that allows this talent to grow, like sunshine bringing a plant into flower.

The special talent of three of the Brontë girls was for writing. No one taught them to write – they taught themselves, and the three of them wrote some of the great novels of the nineteenth century. But life was not easy at home in Haworth. The family was not rich, and the children had to work for a living. And one by one, illness and death cut off their lives and their talents. But the novels written by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne live on, year after year.

This is not one of the stories they wrote; it is about them. It is the story that their father did not write, but might have written: the story of the family that he had for such a short time.

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First published in Oxford Bookworms 1991

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ISBN 978 0 19 479109 0

The publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce photographs: The Brontë Society (at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth), and the Mary Evans Picture Library pp45 (Emily Brontë/SZ Photo/Scherl), 52 (Charlotte Brontë/INTERFOTO /Sammlung Rauch). We would also like to thank Kathryn White of the Brontë Society for her valuable help with the photographs

Word count (main text): 10,600 words

For more information on the Oxford Bookworms Library, visit www.oup.com/bookwormswww.oup.com/bookwormse-Book ISBN 978 0 19 478675 1

e-Book first published 2012

Haworth

There was a cold wind this afternoon, but the sun shone for an hour or two. I walked out on the moors behind the house. The sheep were hiding from the wind under the stone walls, and there were grey clouds over the hills to the west. It is only November, but I could smell snow in the air.

It will be a cold winter, this year of 1855.

My name is Patrick Brontë, and I am seventy-eight years old. I am the rector of the village of Haworth. Haworth is a village of small, grey stone houses on the side of a hill in the north of England, and I live in a house at the top of the hill, next to the church and the graveyard.

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