Name-dropping:
Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818– 1848), and Anne Brontë (1820–1849) (pronunciation: BRON-tay, but more on that later).
A trio of sisters from Yorkshire, England, whose brilliantly imagined novels shook up Victorian literature and have been a staple of 19th-century literature classes ever since.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whenever you find yourself drinking with a student of 19th-century literature, you’ll need all the Brontës you can muster. But knowledge of the Brontës will also come in handy if you get stuck listening to a boring, nostalgic tale of the halcyon days of yore. Just cut them off and say, “I’m sure the holiday parties/red wine/sporting events were better in the old days. But in the old days, no one got to enjoy any of it, because everyone was constantly dying of tuberculosis.”

The Basics
The Brontë sisters were close growing up. They attended boarding school together, and watched their sisters Maria and Elizabeth die of tuberculosis in their childhood. Eventually, they would all share the same fate.

Charlotte
The oldest of the three, Charlotte wrote four novels, but it was her first, Jane Eyre, that’s become a classic. The story of a young governess in love with a man who has a secret (and very crazy) wife chained in his attic, Jane Eyre wasn’t well received by critics, but it sold well from the beginning, and—as is so often the case—the critics ended up looking foolish. Charlotte married at 37; she was pregnant a year later when she died suddenly, apparently of tuberculosis.

Emily
The middle sister, Emily was the quietest of the sisters, but today she’s generally considered the most talented. Her early poems show a talent for verse, and her lone novel, Wuthering Heights, is stylistically dazzling. It contains stories within stories, a reading experience that has been compared to opening a matryoshka doll. But Emily did not live to write another book. Shortly after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she caught tuberculosis. A few months later, she died at the age of 30.

The Unfortunate Mr Branwell Brontë
When the Brontë siblings were children, the girls were thought bright—but not near so talented as young Branwell Brontë, the lone boy. His one literary contribution—an unpublished translation of Horace—was supposedly admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Branwell had something else in common with Coleridge: They were both fond of opium.) The clear black sheep of the family, Branwell got fired from the only two jobs he ever had (once for sleeping with the boss’s wife), and eventually returned home. While his sisters wrote, he spent his days drinking and smoking opium. In the end, he became so strung out that it’s not known for sure whether he ever learned of his sisters’ success. Regardless, soon after the Brontë girls became literary celebrities, Branwell died of— that’s right—tuberculosis.

Anne
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Compared to her sisters, Anne was something of a hack. Pious, quiet, and perhaps too traditional for her own good, Anne’s most famous novel, Agnes Grey, is a mediocre example of the “governess novel” (the 19th- century equivalent of The Nanny Diaries). Still, Anne was only 28 when her second novel was published, and she might have gone on to match her sisters’ brilliance. But she caught—you guessed it—tuberculosis. She died at the age of 29.

Extra Credit:
TB
Something about 19th-century writers—their depressive dispositions, perhaps—seemed to attract death by tuberculosis. Besides the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence, and Anton Chekov all died of TB. Perhaps the most tragic death was that of John Keats, the outlandishly promising British poet who died in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Keats remained a brilliant poet to his bitter end. His last will and testament, one perfect line of iambic pentameter, was also his last poem: “My chest of books divide amongst my friends.”

WHATEVER RINGS YOUR BELL
All three Brontë sisters wrote for most of their lives under gender-ambiguous pseudonyms. Charlotte was Currer Bell; Emily, Ellis Bell; and Anne, Acton Bell. Many 19th-century women (most famously George Eliot) used pseudonyms, because critics and reviewers expected women to write prim-and-proper books. In retrospect, most of the great 19th-century British novelists were women—and none of them wrote merely proper novels.

Conversation Starters
◆ If Brontë seems like an odd name for a middle-class British family, well—it is. The Brontës’ father was an Anglican minister named Patrick Brunty. But the good Rev. Brunty thought his name sounded painfully unsophisticated, so he changed it—several times. First, it was Branty, then Bronte, and then Bronté, before he finally settled on the Brontë.

◆ Incidentally, the accent mark in Brontë is known as a diaeresis, which is a word that frankly contains too many vowels to ever become popular. A diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced. Although extremely rare today, it is still used by The Economist and The New Yorker magazines, both of which spell cooperate “coöperate.”

◆ The next time you worry that your kid is spending too much time with her imaginary friends, consider the Brontës. Well into their young adulthoods, the Brontës talked and wrote about two kingdoms they’d invented as children, Angria and Gondal. The Gothic, soap-operaesque storylines they invented in Angria and Gondal ended up informing both their poems and novels.

◆ Before they became famous, the Brontë sisters wrote poetry together. Using their gender-ambiguous pseudonyms, the Brontës published a book of poems in 1846. It sold exactly two copies.