ABSTRACT
No one could call Anne Bronte's two novels masterpieces; but she deserves neither to be ignored, nor to be regarded only as a pale copy of her sisters. She is absorbing on at least three, though not equal, counts: as the first novel writer of the family, using material later used by Emily and Charlotte; as a norm from which to judge the powers of her sisters in using such material; and as a novelist in her own right with a mode and flavour of her own - worthy of attention, original and good. She resembles Charlotte in having similar experiences to draw upon, and in feeling in her second novel a moral duty to write of an uncongenial topic; she resembles both her sisters in fmding man's inhumanity to man a fitting element in a love story; and in being startlingly unconventional, unsophisticated, and candid. She uses some of the methods of both in organizing her material. But her own personality, her way of considering the experiences she puts before her heroines, and the idiom in which her heroines present them, are not so much akin to her sisters as to the eighteenth century. If the reader goes to Anne Bronte for what either Charlotte or Emily offers, he is disappointed. If he takes pleasure in Fanny Burney or Maria Edgeworth - or, to name a greater, Jane Austen - he will find her manner congenial and her writing attractive. While I propose to relate her novels to those of Charlotte or Emily where the connection is useful to either sister, I intend also to assess them on their own terms, for what they attempt and achieve.
