Bronte sisters memorial given correct dots after 85 years in Westminster Abbey
A memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë has had the dots above their surname added nearly 85 years after it was first installed at Westminster Abbey.
The diaereses – the two dots above the letter E at the end of the Brontë name – were omitted when it originally commemorated the novelists on Oct 8 1939, one week after the outbreak of the Second World War.
Sharon Wright, the journalist and Brontë historian who edits the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with the Very Rev Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster. The Abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
Ms Wright, who spotted the omission during a research trip to Poets’ Corner, told the PA news agency that the diaereses being left off the sisters’ names “really troubled” her. She said: “The names of the Brontë sisters were spelled incorrectly. They didn’t have the correct punctuation on the E, so it sounded more like ‘Bront’ not ‘Brontë’.”
She said she was “really puzzled” that in 85 years she seemed to be “the first person on record” to complain about the fact the dots had been omitted.
She added: “There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really.
“And it’s lovely because it’s 85 years since it went in, in October. So it’s a sort of timely happy ending, isn’t it nice?”
‘They deserve this’
Ms Wright, who is from Bradford, not far from where the sisters lived in Haworth, says: “These three Yorkshirewomen deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
She added that the Brontë Society, which sponsored the memorial, was “really happy” with the change.
In a statement, Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, said the group was “very grateful to the Dean of Westminster and his colleagues at the abbey for their positive response to Sharon’s inquiries”.
She added: “As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial.”
The Dean of Westminster said: “I am grateful to have this omission pointed out and now put right.
“Memory is not a locked cupboard, but an active thing and the Brontë Society have given us a glimpse of their commitment to a lively remembering.”
Unveiling delayed by war
Records indicate that the rectangular tablet of Huddlestone stone, measuring 24 inches square and located near plaques for the novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, did not have a formal ceremony of unveiling until July 19 1947, after the war was over, and the missing diaereses appear not to have been noticed.
It has long been thought that Patrick Brontë – Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s father – changed his Irish surname of Prunty or Brunty when he entered St John’s College, Cambridge.
During their short lives, Charlotte wrote the works Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette; Emily authored Wuthering Heights; and Anne published The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey.
Charlotte, who married Arthur Bell Nicholls, was the last of her siblings to die, at the age of 38 in 1855.
