Charlotte Bronte’s father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was born in Ireland on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1777, at Emdale, near Rathfriland, in the County Down. His father, Charlotte’s grandfather, Hugh Prunty—his Scotch Presbyterian neighbours called him Brunty—came from somewhere in the south of Ireland, but where exactly his paternal home was he could never ascertain. When he was twenty-two he made a runaway match with Alice McClorey of Ballynaskeagh, a neighbouring townland. Alice McClorey was a Catholic, and her brother, with whom she lived, and her relatives were much opposed to the marriage, which took place secretly in the Protestant church of Magherally. After a brief honeymoon the young people returned to live in a two-roomed thatched cottage at Emdale, near Rathfriland, where ten children were subsequently born to them, and all of them were brought up Protestants.

The eldest son, Patrick, shortly after entering Cambridge in the year 1802, changed his name from Branty, the name signed in the Register of the University, to Bronte. Prior to that time there were no Brontes in Ireland. Being an Ulsterman, although born of a Catholic mother, the Rev. Patrick Bronte was of the ultra-Protestant type so peculiar to the North-East corner of Ireland. A speech against Catholic Emancipation was his one venture into the arena of the politics of his time. To the members of his family he passed on a legacy of intolerance, but, of the three sisters, to judge from their writings, Charlotte seems to have inherited more than her share of it.