The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house.  Her sister, Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to look after the children.  You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked.  She took possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in the house), and lived in it.  Her nieces had to sit there with her for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early Victorian virtues.  Their father made himself responsible for the rest of their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and originality.  Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise.  Long before Maria was eleven he “conversed” with her on “the leading topics of the day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person”.

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror.  At six years old each little Bronte had its view of the political situation; and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood about a nursery.  In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters’ School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley.  It has been immortalized in Jane Eyre, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson.  There can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge.  And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley.  Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontes.  They had another destiny.  Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge.  First Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die.  Charlotte stayed on for a while with Emily.  She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water.  Their doom waited for Charlotte and for Emily.