Maria Branwell dutifully worked through piles of schoolboy mending, wondering when she could escape back home to the society balls and cosmopolitan bustle of Regency Penzance.
She had left Cornwall in the warm west of England and headed north to help her aunt and uncle at their new Methodist boarding school in windswept Yorkshire.
It was an adventure and she liked her cousin Jane, but chores at rural Woodhouse Grove School were a long way from what she was used to.
She missed the Penzance Ladies Book Club and fashionable soirees at the Assembly Rooms.
Then, a long-limbed, red-haired stranger strode up to the door in June 1812, carrying a staff like a moorland Moses, and everything changed.
The Rev. Patrick Bront? was a friend of Jane’s fiancé, William Morgan, and arrived to test the pupils. Instead, he got a lesson in love.
Patrick was tall, and Maria was tiny. He was from poor Irish farming stock and she was “perfectly my own mistress” with an income from her late father, a gentleman merchant.
Yet when the witty and elegant bluestocking met the ambitious and scholarly parson, Miss Branwell knew she was never going home.
After a whirlwind courtship, Patrick proposed in late August, at the gothic ruin of medieval Kirkstall Abbey. It was supposed to be their secret, but Patrick blabbed and she wrote to scold him.
Like her contemporary and social equal Jane Austen, Maria was a lady of letters.
“Have you not been too hasty in informing your friends of a certain event?” Maria wrote.
“Why did you not leave them to guess a little longer?”
Everyone did guess. When a lovestruck Patrick forgot to tell the school to expect a visit from his landlord, Maria wrote that her uncle deemed him to be “mazed” with love and “they all agreed that I was the cause of it.”
She was pretty mazed herself, and in an intimate letter before their December wedding, she wrote: “My dear Saucy Pat, Now don’t you think you deserve this epithet, far more, than I do that which you have given me?”
(Sadly, his naughty nickname for her remains unknown.)
The couple married at Christmas, and a besotted Pat wrote a love poem for his bride’s 30th birthday in April 1813, with the lines: “How much enhanced is all this bliss to me/Since it is shared, in mutual joy with thee!”
Barely a year after they met, the new Mrs. Bront? was pregnant.
Baby Maria arrived in 1814, followed by Elizabeth in 1815, Charlotte in 1816, Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820.
After baby No. 6, they moved to the Parsonage in Haworth, but their bliss was coming to an end.
In January 1821, Maria suddenly collapsed — and Patrick’s world with her.
She had incurable cancer. Patrick tended his “beloved sufferer” for seven months, nursing her alone through the night.
“Death pursued her unrelentingly,” he wrote and she suffered “more agonizing pain than I ever saw anyone endure.”
As death closed in, Maria cried: “Oh, my poor children!”
On Sept. 15, the little Bront?s — the eldest only 7 — stood at the foot of the bed as their mother slipped away.
Patrick was distraught and almost buckled under the weight of his loss.
“I would answer to this, that tender sorrow was my daily portion; that oppressive grief sometimes lay heavy on me and that there were seasons when an affectionate, agonizing something sickened my whole frame,” he wrote.
He never remarried, and death also pursued his children unrelentingly.
Maria and Elizabeth died as children, Branwell at 31, Emily at 30, Anne at 29 and Charlotte at 38.
The Bront? masterpieces survive, including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” — worldwide bestsellers almost two centuries later.
The loss of their mother surfaced often in their writing. The Bront? sisters’ characters so often grow up motherless, from Jane Eyre to Cathy and Heathcliff.
Patrick outlived everyone he loved to die at 84, joining Maria in the family tomb in 1861. Mazed lovers, mother and father of genius, together again.
Sharon Wright is the author of “The Mother of the Bront?s: When Maria Met Patrick” (Pen and Sword), out now.