An 85-year injustice has been rectified at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey with the corrected spelling of one of the greatest of all literary names. Reader, it is finally Brontë, not Bronte.
An amended memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë was unveiled on Thursday with added diaereses (two dots) that ensure people pronounce it with two syllables. As if it rhymed with Monty, not font.
The memorial was installed in 1939 and, for whatever reason, came without the diaereses that the Brontës used.
The correction came about after an approach to the abbey by Sharon Wright, the editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, who visited Poets’ Corner as part of research for a new book.
“The first thing I thought was: ‘They’ve spelt the names wrong!’ Surely I can’t be the first person to notice it. I don’t think I am but I might be the first to call it to anyone’s attention and say ‘can we spell the names right please?’,” Wright said. “These women are three of this country’s greatest writers. They deserve to have their names spelt correctly on the memorial created to honour them.”
Wright remembered feeling genuine indignation when she saw the plaque. “I’m from Bradford like them and I want them celebrated properly in London, or that London, as we say. They are Yorkshire heroines and their name is Brontë, not Bronte.”
Wright said everyone else’s name in Poets’ Corner was spelled correctly, not least the poet Robert Southey who is represented by a magnificent monument and bust.
Southey is something of a villain in Brontë circles in that he told 20-year-old Charlotte that poetry and literary creation could not and should not be a woman’s work. “I thought ‘they’ve got his name right’ before I went stomping off,” Wright said.
She was half expecting a battle to get the name corrected but actually found an open, friendly door and a willingness to correct.
The reasons for the mistake are not clear although timing presumably played a part, in that the tablet was installed on 8 October 1939, soon after the outbreak of the second world war.
It meant there was no fanfare. In a letter dated 2 November that year, Paul de Labilliere, then the dean of Westminster, wrote: “I should greatly wish that its completion should be marked by a ceremonial unveiling but in these times anything of that sort is out of the question.”
The installation was sponsored by the Brontë Society, founded in 1893 and one of the oldest literary societies in the world.
It was July 1947 before there was a formal ceremony at the abbey with the society, by which point bigger issues about rebuilding the nation were on collective minds. Or society members perhaps felt they should be grateful for just being there. “I don’t know,” said Wright. “You know Yorkshire people, we do like to stick our hand up and make a fuss, so I don’t know what happened there.”
The missing diaereses may be as much of a mystery as the diaereses themselves. No one can say with absolute certainty why the Brontë name evolved from their father Patrick’s Irish surname of Prunty or Brunty when he arrived at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1802.
It may have had something to do with his admiration for Horatio Nelson, who was made Duke of Bronte, and the way Patrick, as someone born in County Down, would pronounce it. It may also have been a gentrification based on a Greek word for thunder.
None of that matters in Wright’s eyes. “This is not about the men, it’s about the women and their name was Brontë, that is how they spelt it from being really little girls. This is a really happy and timely ending to the story.”
Those sentiments were echoed by the dean of Westminster, David Hoyle, who said he was grateful to have the omission pointed out and now put right.
“Memory is not a locked cupboard, but an active thing,” he said. “The Brontë Society have given us a glimpse of their commitment to a lively remembering.”