The literary achievement of the Brontë sisters is difficult to disentangle from the powerful set of myths which has grown up around the family over the past one hundred and fifty years. In the case of Anne Brontë this problem is compounded by the fact that she has for so long been overshadowed by her two elder siblings, Emily and Charlotte. This is illustrated by the critical reaction to Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey (1847). First published in tandem with Wuthering Heights, it was significantly eclipsed by the controversy generated by Emily 's text. At the same time, the subject matter of Anne's first novel, the life of a governess, led to unfavourable comparisons with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which had appeared only two months before. The tendency among Brontë's contemporary reviewers to evaluate her achievement in terms of that of her sisters has been, equally – until fairly recently – a characteristic of the work of many twentieth-century critics. The habitual recourse to such comparatist approaches is matched only by biographical ones which, in Elizabeth Langland's paraphrase, reinforce Charlotte Brontë's conviction that ‘Anne's novels were basically autobiographical’. Yet the problem with criticism which draws on biographical material in relation to Anne is that it only feeds the larger cultural fascination with the lives of the Brontë's without necessarily contributing to an understanding of her work.

While some of the mystery surrounding the identities of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was resolved by Charlotte after the deaths of her sisters in 1848 and 1849 respectively, speculation about the Brontës did not end there. How did the daughters of a village clergyman, who lived relatively sheltered lives in Haworth, manage to capture the imagination of the reading public with their novels? What experiences shaped their passionate, often brutal artistic visions? How did these women make such an impact on the male-dominated genre of the novel? These questions have been asked by successive generations of readers drawn as much to the tragedy of the Brontës’ short lives as to the literary worlds which they created.