In the late spring of 2022, the COVID pandemic was not entirely history, but several nations, including the United Kingdom, began easing travel restrictions. After a long transatlantic flight and a ride on an LNER train, I arrived in Yorkshire with a sense of release, strolling across high moors and savoring the valley’s late-spring blossoms—bluebells, cowslips, and fields of bright meadow buttercups. While touring preserved landscapes inevitably carries a hint of performative nostalgia (the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors National Parks are especially inviting embodiments of that folklore), the vigor of May’s blooms broke through my carefully maintained irony, leaving me marveling at the season’s exuberance.
I found myself recalling the spring blossoms at Lowood in , and more broadly the Brontë sisters’ novels, rooted in the West Riding of Yorkshire where they lived and which had accompanied me from childhood through graduate studies and into a professional career as a Victorianist. What became clear to me in that post-COVID spring was that the landscape surrounding the Brontës shaped their experience of nature and lent particularity to their storytelling. That particularity begged for what I think of as a kind of field-guide to the novels—what the Victorians would have called a “flora,” and which in the excerpt here, I refer to as botany.
Illustration by Tugce Okay.
From Lucasta Miller’s compelling The Brontë Myth (2001) I was aware that the Brontës had been subjected to a process of myth-making that Charlotte herself helped initiate and that intensified after all three sisters had died. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s famously ornate portrait of the Brontë home, presented in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), she described the 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.
Gaskell’s biography helped fuse the Brontës with the moors as a shorthand for harshness—and the sense that love, in that inhospitable place, was a rarity, where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë spent most of their brief, tuberculosis-afflicted lives. This framing served a particular kind of narrative, but it should surprise no one acquainted with moorland ecosystems that many plant species thrive there. Anyone who has read the sisters’ novels and poems knows that plant names frequently appear, and sometimes even anchor a pivotal moment.
The landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives.
We can infer, for example, from the novels that the Brontë sisters knew the wild primrose—Primula vulgaris, shown above/at left—and we know that Charlotte even produced a watercolor of the primrose (along with other capable if dutiful depictions of violets, roses, and morning glories). Late in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine Linton sidles up to Hareton and taunts him by “sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.” It’s a playful turn away from the solemn seriousness of the primrose references that follows the first Catherine’s death in childbirth—the day after Catherine Earnshaw’s funeral, when the weather turns foul, silencing the larks, darkening the early spring leaves, and burying “the primroses and crocuses” under “wintry drifts.”
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, originally issued in a three-volume edition along with Wuthering Heights in 1847, also references (as Anne wrote) “that familiar flower,” yet hers is notably different from Emily’s. Agnes Grey centers on an early courtship between Agnes and Mr. Weston, who—seeking to console the affronted governess—gathers from “high up between the twisted roots of an oak, three lovely primroses.” The novel marks Agnes’s virtue and disciplined mind through her more rational appreciation of nature, as she shifts from a flirtation scene to “botanising and entomologising amongst the green banks.”
To be precise: the three sisters’ acquaintance with the primrose did not signify any specialized knowledge of the natural world. In 1597 the English herbalist John Gerard described and drew several primroses for The Herball; or Generall Historie of Plants. But if you haven’t laid eyes on a wild primrose recently, knowing that the flower exists does little to illuminate Wuthering Heights or Agnes Grey—as Anne Pratt, the nineteenth-century author of The Language of Flowers, notes, the primrose is “so common a flower as to need no description.”
As the literary critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry has persuasively observed, flowers are among the most “imaginable” objects because they are also among the most beautiful. Yet if you don’t recognize this so-called common flower, your imagining of it may falter. The botanical illustration of Primula vulgaris helps us picture the primrose’s pale-yellow bell-shaped blossoms and its bright green leaves, often described as tongue-shaped. And although a quick keystroke can summon a host of images of this familiar bloom, we inhabit a moment when nature seems increasingly distant and endangered, even as it appears more visually accessible than ever. Despite our dizzying ability to search for plant photos and texts, many of us feel cut off from the knowledge of the natural world that was once ordinary in the Victorian era.
Maybe it takes a field of meadow buttercups and a hillside peppered with bluebells rising beyond the tree line to remind us that we must cultivate the ability to imagine flowers. And in doing so, we can gain a deeper understanding of the classic novels whose force often rests on these very elements.
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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.
