Ellen Nussey

Ellen Nussey (20 April 1817 – 26 November 1897) was born in Birstall Smithies in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. She was a lifelong friend and correspondent of author Charlotte Brontë and, through more than 500 letters received from her, was a major influence for Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë.

Nussey was the twelfth child of John Nussey (1760–1826), a cloth merchant of Birstall Smithies, near Gomersal in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his wife Ellen, née Wade (c.1771–1857). Nussey attended a small local school before progressing to Gomersal Moravian Ladies Academy. Nussey met Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë in January 1831, when they were pupils at Roe Head School, near Mirfield in Yorkshire. They corresponded regularly over the next 24 years, each writing hundreds of letters to the other. In 1839, Ellen Nussey's brother, Henry, proposed marriage to Brontë, but she found him dull and refused his offer.

Through her frequent visits to the Parsonage at Haworth, Nussey also became a friend of Anne and Emily Brontë, and was accepted as a suitable friend for his daughters by their father. In May 1849, Anne decided to visit Scarborough in the hope that the change of location and fresh sea air might be good for her failing health, and give her a chance to live, she went with Charlotte and Nussey. Before the trip, Anne expressed her frustration over unfulfilled ambitions in a letter to Ellen:

I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect ... But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa's and Charlotte's sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise–humble and limited indeed–but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God's will be done.

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