A Brontë Botany: Reading the Sisters Through the Flowers They Knew

In late May 2022, Amy M. King, a Victorianist by profession, crossed the Yorkshire moors on foot among bluebells, cowslips and meadow buttercups. That walk became a book. A Brontë Botany: Flora in the Classic Novels of the Brontë Sisters, illustrated by Tugce Okay and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2026, sets out to function as what the Victorians called a "flora" — a field-guide to the plant life that runs through Charlotte's, Emily's and Anne's fiction.

King's central claim is direct: "The landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives." The landscape was Yorkshire's West Riding, where the three sisters lived most of their short, tuberculosis-ridden lives.

Why did the Brontës get a reputation for bleakness?

King traces the answer to Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which described the Haworth parsonage 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.

That florid passage, King argues, produced a persistent conflation of the Brontës with the moors as a metonym for bleakness — the sense that nothing flourished there, least of all love. Gaskell's biography gave rise to a mythologizing process that Charlotte herself initiated and that Lucasta Miller later charted in The Brontë Myth (2001). Anyone who knows the moorland habitat, King notes, knows that plants of many kinds grow there. And anyone who has read the sisters' novels knows that common plant names are often invoked, sometimes anchoring a telling scene.

What does the primrose change for the novels?

Take Primula vulgaris, the wild primrose. Charlotte painted a watercolor of it, alongside dutiful renditions of violets, roses and morning glories. Emily put the flower to darker use. Late in Wuthering Heights, Catherine Linton teases Hareton by "sticking primroses in his plate of porridge" — a comic turn away from the gravity that follows Catherine Earnshaw's death in childbirth. The day after her funeral, foul weather buries "the primroses and crocuses" under "wintry drifts."

Anne's primrose works differently. Agnes Grey, published with Wuthering Heights in a three-volume edition in 1847, contains an early courtship scene in which Mr. Weston, seeking to comfort the affronted governess, gathers from "high up between the twisted roots of an oak, three lovely primroses." The novel signals Agnes's virtue when she turns from flirtation to "botanise and entomologise amongst the green banks."

King is candid about the limits of this knowledge. Knowing the primrose did not indicate deep or specialized botanical learning. The English herbalist John Gerard had described and drawn several primroses as early as 1597 in The Herball; or Generall Historie of Plants. Anne Pratt, the nineteenth-century author of The Language of Flowers, called the plant "so common a flower as to need no description." But that commonness has evaporated.

Why a printed botany now?

King draws on the critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry, who has written that flowers are the most "imaginable" of objects because they are the most beautiful. Yet a reader who has never seen a wild primrose will find the imagining short-circuits. Okay's botanical illustration of Primula vulgaris — its pale-yellow bell-shaped flowers, its tongue-shaped bright green leaves — brings the reader closer than a keystroke's worth of photographs might suggest.

King's diagnosis of the present is blunt: despite a dizzying capacity to search up images of plants, many of us are increasingly alienated from the natural-world knowledge that was ordinary in the Victorian period, at a time when nature seems increasingly distant and endangered.

What does this change for the reader of the classics? King's answer is that it takes work — perhaps a hillside of bluebells leading up to a bleak moor — to imagine flowers again, and in doing so to better understand the classic novels whose force often depends upon them.

A Brontë Botany: Flora in the Classic Novels of the Brontë Sisters by Amy M. King, illustrated by Tugce Okay, is available from Andrews McMeel Publishing.