In late May of 2022, the COVID pandemic was not completely over, but many countries, including the United Kingdom, starting lifting restrictions on travel. And so, after a transatlantic flight and a LNER train, in what felt like a state of liberation, I found myself in Yorkshire in late May, striding across the high moors and exulting in the lowland valley’s late spring blooms of bluebells, cowslips, and fields of bright yellow meadow buttercups. Although there is always an element of cosplay in visiting preserved landscapes (and the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors National Parks are particularly welcome versions of them), the force of the spring bloom that May shook my carefully tended irony, and I simply marveled at the late spring eruption.
I thought of the spring blooms at Lowood in Jane Eyre, and more generally of the novels of the Brontë sisters, who had lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire and whose novels had accompanied me from my pre-teen years through graduate school and on to a professional life in the academy as a Victorianist. What was clear to me in that post-COVID spring was that the landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives. A specificity that demanded what I thought of as a kind of field-guide to the novels—what the Victorians called a “flora,” and which in the book excerpted here, I call a botany.
Illustration by Tugce Okay.
From Lucasta Miller’s compelling The Brontë Myth (2001) I was aware that the Brontës had been subject to a process of mythologizing that Charlotte herself initiated and which began in earnest after all of the sisters’ deaths. In a famously florid description of the Brontë parsonage, Elizabeth Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) described it as
a place where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish…where the snow lay long and late on the moors, stretching bleakly and barely…and where often, on autumn or winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and merge and rage together.
Gaskell’s biography gave rise to the persistent conflation of the Brontës with the moors as a metonym for bleakness—and the sense that nothing flourished in that inhospitable place, least of all love, where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë famously lived most of their short tuberculosis-ridden lives. That served a particular kind of narrative, but it will come as no surprise to those who know the moorland habitat that plants of many kinds grow there. And anyone who has read the novels and poetry of the famous sisters knows that the common names of plants are often invoked, and sometimes even anchor a telling scene.
The landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives.
We can surmise, for instance, from the novels that the Brontë sisters knew the wild primrose—Primula vulgaris, pictured above/at left—and we know that Charlotte painted a watercolor of the primrose (alongside other adept if dutiful renditions of violets, roses, and morning glories). Late in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine Linton sidles up to Hareton and teases him by “sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.” It’s a comic turn away from the dead-on seriousness of the references to primroses that follows the first-Catherine’s death in childbirth—the day after Catherine Earnshaw’s funeral, the weather turns foul, silencing the larks, blackening the early spring leaves, and burying “the primroses and crocuses” under “wintry drifts.”
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, which was originally published in a three-volume edition with Wuthering Heights in 1847, also references (as Anne wrote) “that familiar flower,” but hers is strikingly different from Emily’s. Agnes Grey centers an early scene of courtship between Agnes and Mr. Weston, who—seeking to comfort the affronted governess—gathers from “high up between the twisted roots of an oak, three lovely primroses.” The novel signals Agnes’ virtue and ideal mind through her more rational appreciation of nature, as she turns away from a scene of flirtation to “botanise and entomologise amongst the green banks.”
To be clear: that the three authors knew the primrose did not indicate a particularly deep or specialized knowledge of the natural world. In 1597 the English herbalist John Gerard had described and drew several primroses for The Herball; or Generall Historie of Plants. But if you haven’t yourself seen a wild primrose lately, it doesn’t much help when reading Wuthering Heights or Agnes Grey to know that the wild primrose was, as Anne Pratt, the nineteenth-century author of The Language of Flowers says, “so common a flower as to need no description.”
As the literary critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry has compellingly written, flowers are the most “imaginable” of objects because they are the most beautiful. But if you don’t know this so-called common flower, your imagining of it tends to short-circuit. The botanical illustration of Primula vulgaris brings us closer to the primrose’s pale-yellow bell-shaped flowers, its bright green leaves that are often evocatively described as tongue shaped. And although a keystroke can bring up an array of photographs of the common flower, we are living through a time when nature seems increasingly distant and endangered, even as it has never seemed more visually accessible. Despite a dizzying capacity to search up images and books about plants, many of us are increasingly alienated from the knowledge of the natural world that was common in the Victorian period.
Perhaps it takes a field of meadow buttercups, and a hillside dotted with bluebells leading up beyond the tree line to a bleak moor, to remind us that we need to work to imagine flowers. And in so doing, to better understand the classic novels whose force often depends upon them.
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From A Brontë Botany: Flora in the Classic Novels of the Brontë Sisters by Amy M. King, illustrated by Tugce Okay. Copyright © 2026. Available from Andrews McMeel Publishing.