In spite of their humble origins as the daughters of an obscure Yorkshire curate, their short lives and their lack of proximity to any of the typical urban centers of artistic production, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne Brontë (1820-1849), determined to make a name for themselves as writers, left for posterity a body of work- poems, novels, letters and stories- of immense genius. The freshness of their voices, their vision of unapologetically individualistic femininity, the richness of their description of the interior life of individuals in northern England (and of humanity in general)- all of these aspects make the work of the Brontës central in English literary history.

They wrote under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (taking the first letter of each of their names and and creating a male sobriquet) in order to protect themselves from intrusions into their privacy and to protect their work from being unjustly criticised on the basis of gender by a Victorian critical audience that had shown itself none too receptive to the idea of women writing frankly about the inner workings of their minds. Charlotte, as Currer Bell, published four novels, Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853) and The Professor (1857- posthumous). Jane Eyre became a sensational bestseller and wound up making Charlotte, in her own lifetime, and her sisters, after theirs, literary celebrities. Anne, writing as Acton Bell, published two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The latter book, long suppressed for its frankness and violence, has only recently achieved its status as a great novel. Emily's lone and mighty novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), which was initially attacked and caused a great scandal in Victorian society for its violence, depravity, its frank depiction of inhumanity and its unrestrained, unedited view into human emotion and motivation, has since achieved its rightful place as one of the greatest novels in English.

Their lives and the work they left behind has spawned a literary industry unto itself. Scarcely a year passes without some new biography of one of the sisters; each summer, tens of thousands of people from as far away as Japan make the trek to the pasonage at Haworth where they were raised; the literary society created in their name is the oldest of its type in existence; and all over the world, millions of students speaking countless different languages in schoolrooms and colleges on every continent read the novels. This Pathfinder is an attempt to draw together in one place a list of resources for the purpose of helping those students and scholars wishing to pursue research in this ever expanding and enormous field.

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