For 85 years, a stone tablet honoring literary greats Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë has hung in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner with a blatant omission. The sisters, three of the UK's greatest writers, spelled their last name Brontë, with diaereses over the last vowel, indicating a separate syllable. Westminster Abbey's plaque had none, and when the editor of the Brontë Society Gazette saw it recently, she was furious. "The first thing I thought was: 'They've spelt the names wrong!'" Sharon Wright tells the Guardian. She says she likely wasn't the first person to notice the error, but was apparently the first to call attention to it.
Though the siblings' father, Patrick, was using the Irish surname of Prunty or Brunty in 1802, the sisters used the name Brontë from the time that they were "really little girls," says Wright, a journalist and Brontë historian. She informed Abbey staff and found a receptive audience eager to right a wrong. "Memory is not a locked cupboard, but an active thing," says David Hoyle, dean of Westminster. "I am grateful to have this omission pointed out and now put right." A fix came Thursday as a stonemason tapped the dots into the stone and a conservator painted them black to match the rest of the lettering, the Abbey explains.
Charlotte penned Jane Eyre, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne authored The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. "These women are three of this country's greatest writers," says Wright. "They deserve to have their names spelt correctly on the memorial created to honor them." It's unclear why the diaereses were missing. Instructions for the wording of the memorial included the two dots. Yet war might have proved a distraction. The Brontë memorial was installed Oct. 8, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, and a formal ceremony didn't take place until July 1947, by which point "the nation was re-building itself ... and the missing diaereses appear not to have been mentioned," the Abbey said. (More Westminster Abbey stories.)
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