Augustine Birrell has told us, with
that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking Irish curate
made successful love to a young parishioner--Miss Mary Burder. Mary
Burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and
guardian. She was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers
never met again. There are doubtful points in Mr. Birrell's story. Mary
Burder, as the wife of a Nonconformist minister, died in 1866, in her
seventy-seventh year. This lady, from whom doubtless either directly or
indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated
a very innocent flirtation. One would like further evidence for the
statement that when Mr. Bronte lost his wife in 1821 he asked his old
sweetheart, Mary Burder, to become the mother of his six children, and
that she answered 'no'. In any case, Mr. Bronte left Weatherfield in
1809 for a curacy at Dewsbury, and Dewsbury gossip also had much to say
concerning the flirtations of its Irish curate. His next curacy,
however, which was obtained in 1811, by a removal to Hartshead, near
Huddersfield, brought flirtation for Mr. Bronte to a speedy end. In
1812, when thirty-three years of age, he married Miss Maria Branwell, of
Penzance. Miss Branwell had only a few months before left her Cornish
home for a visit to an uncle in Yorkshire.
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