The almost relationship

The Independent wonders why Gen Z is 'so obsessed with the ‘almost relationship’'.

Introducing the “almost relationship”, a dynamic that has captured pop culture (Normal People), literature (Wuthering Heights) and delusionally romantic people (hello) for centuries. To be clear, this is not the same thing as a situationship. (Olivia Petter)

After finding out that Branwell was named after her mother's family name, a columnist from Darlington & Stockton Times is intrigued to find out more about Maria Brontë née Branwell.

"Branwell Brontë was given that name because it was his mother's maiden name."

As I am sure you know, Branwell was the brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, but Gareth's comment made me more curious about the people in that famous family about whom we hear much less, such as their mother, Maria.

And the more I learn, the more tragedy I discover.

Maria Branwell was born in Penzance, Cornwall, in 1783, but lost both parents within a year of each other.

In 1812, she decided to go and stay with her Aunt Jane in Yorkshire who had married a chap called John Fennell, headmaster of Woodhouse Grove School in Appleby Bridge near Bradford.

Maria hadn't planned to move there permanently but soon after arriving met her Uncle John's friend, Irish clergyman Patrick Brontë.

According to the sources I've read, the pair fell instantly in love, and married in December 1812.

By then, Maria was 29 and Patrick 35, which was considered a bit long in the tooth to be newly wed, but the pair seemed very happy and their first child, Maria, was born in 1814, swiftly followed by their second, Elizabeth, the following year.

Charlotte came along in 1816, followed by Patrick Branwell in 1817.

He was given his mother's maiden name as a middle name, but it was the one by which he was

known.

Maria gave birth to two more children, Emily in 1818, and finally Anne in 1820.

Unfortunately, in January 1821 when Anne had just turned one, Maria began to feel unwell.

She became gravely ill, and died in the September, likely from some form of cancer.

Four years later in 1825, the two eldest children, Maria, aged 11, and Elizabeth, aged 10, also died.

Poor Patrick Brontë was destined to outlive his whole family, with Branwell and Emily dying in 1848, Anne in 1849, and finally Charlotte in 1855.

The Brontë children were all very intelligent and, as we know, excellent writers.

Most would assume their literary prowess was inherited from their learned father, but in fact their mother was talented in that department too, as Charlotte discovered when her father gave her some letters that Maria had written to him during their courtship, 40 years earlier.

"It was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang," she wrote, "And most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order…There is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable I wish she had lived and that I had known her." (Sarah Walker)

Yesterday AnneBrontë.org marked the anniversary of Emily and Anne getting their author copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in 1847.