Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë (1820–1849), the youngest of the three Brontë sisters, was born at Thornton, near Bradford, and died at Scarborough. She worked as a governess, first at Blake Hall, Mirfield, and from 1841 to 1845 at Thorp Green, near York, and published under the name Acton Bell. Her religious feeling, her grief for lost friends and her sense of duty run through her verse, and some of her early poems belong to the Gondal cycle she wrote with her sister Emily.

Twenty-one of her poems appeared in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), given here in their 1846 text. The other thirty-three are taken from The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë, edited by Clement Shorter with a bibliographical introduction by C. W. Hatfield (Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), which first gathered all fifty-four. Where the volume gives a date of composition it is recorded in the poem's note; the editors' introductions, footnotes and variant readings are left out.