While Scary Little Girls is performing literary cabaret The Full Brontë at the Edinburgh Free Fringe, we’ll be asking punters: Which Brontë are you? Take this quick, fun, Cosmo-style quiz and find out for yourself whether you’re a Charlotte, an Emily, or an Anne!
Home: You grow up in the isolated Haworth parsonage in the Yorkshire Pennines, brought up by an aunt who shocks visitors by offering them snuff and a father who starts the day by firing a pistol out of his bedroom window. This unconventional upbringing manifests in which of the following traits?
A. You develop a strong foreign accent, a protective and nurturing attitude to your siblings and a deep seated hatred for Catholicism. (1 point)
B. You regularly sketch yourself and your family but you always sketch yourself from the back view, as if someone had drawn it who was standing a few paces behind you. (2 points)
C. With your sister, you create an island world with a female governor, the description, maps and architectural blueprints of which you write out in books the size of matchboxes. (3 points)
Career: You share an immersive creative process with your siblings and between you produce some of the most visionary and enduring novels in the English language. Which of the following descriptions of this work do you most identify with?
A. You dig deep into the most difficult emotional tribulations, losses and humiliations of your life and use these to improve your work and successfully communicate with others. (1 point)
B. Your work attracts strong and diverse feelings – your fans might describe it as “wild, melancholy and elevating” but your critics dismiss you as having a depraved mind. (2 points)
C. You believe that your work should provide a moral education and as a result you tackle radical social issues, such as domestic violence and the rights of marginalised female workers. (3 points)
Love: Despite – or perhaps because of – your isolated upbringing and active imagination, you develop intense and passionate romantic attachments. Which of the following sounds most familiar to you?
A. After a life-time of falling for intelligent, fiery, Byronic men, usually married ones, you finally find your soul-mate in a conventional and rigid young parson. (1 point)
B. When the person closest to you finally dies from a combination of alcoholism, laudanum abuse and tuberculosis, you never leave your house again. (2 points)
C. You are so shy that when you fall in love with a handsome young curate working for your father, you can only express it privately in poetry and consequently he leaves your life without ever knowing how you felt – his death not long after he leaves Haworth inspires you to…write some more poetry. (3 points)
So, how did you score?
Click here if you scored 3, 4 or 5 points.
Click here if you scored 6 or 7 points.
Click here if you scored 8 or 9 points.
