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Brontė

The Brontė sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were famous English writers of the 1840s and 1850s, three of the six children of the Rev. Patrick Brontė and his wife Maria Branwell. They wrote under the name Bell (Acton, Currier and Ellis) and lived on the Yorkshire Moor. They all died of diptheria at young ages, with Charlotte the last survivor.

The only other known sibling is Branwell Bronte.

The Rev. Brontė was the eldest son of Hugh Prunty, also known as Hugh Brunty, and changed the orthography of his last name several times during his lifetime, from Brunty to Branty to Bronte to Bronté to Brontė. The dieresis over the final e indicates that it is pronounced rather than silent.

The spelling changes have been said to have been influenced by the classical figure Bronte, or by the gift of land in the town of Bronte, Sicily in 1799 from Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to Admiral Horatio Nelson.

The Rev. Brontė had no grandchildren and hence has no living descendants.

See also