ANNE BRONTEAnne Brontë, who published under the pen name Acton Bell, was an English novelist and poet and the youngest of the Brontë sisters. Born in 1820 in Thornton, Yorkshire, and raised at Haworth Parsonage, she grew up in one of the most remarkable literar households of the nineteenth century. Alongside Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, she first appeared in print in the 1846 volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, using a male pseudonym in keeping with the sisters' wish to avoid the prejudices attached to women writers of the period. The Library of Congress notes the pseudonymous publication of the sisters' poems and identifies Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, as published under the name Acton Bell in 1847.Brontë's fiction is marked by moral seriousness, social observation, and a refusal to romanticise cruelty, dependency, or male misconduct. Agnes Grey drew on her own years of work as a governess and remains one of the clearest literary treatments of that precarious position in Victorian society. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, extended her critique of marriage, alcoholism, gendered power, and social hypocrisy with a directness that startled many early readers. Though long overshadowed by Charlotte and Emily, Anne Brontë is now recognised as a major Victorian novelist in her own right, valued for her realism, ethical clarity, religious seriousness, and disciplined prose. Read More Read Less