Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

proprietress of Law Hill School, in Southowram near Halifax, where Emily taught for six months in 1838–9. The most information about her is to be found in Ellis Chadwick’s In the Footsteps of the Brontës . She talked to ex-pupils and neighbors, and the consensus was that Miss Patchett was a beautiful woman, a fine horsewoman, and an extremely capable schoolmistress by the standards of her time. She also seems to have involved her pupils and their teachers in the busy cultural life of Halifax. She married the Rev. John Hope in December 1842, but according to Chadwick he died in the next year. She gave up the school on marriage, and information about her later life is sparse. However, a neighbor remembered her in her eighties visiting Law Hill, still spry: she “could nip about from room to room quite gaily” (Chadwick, 1914, p. 126). ... log in or subscribe to read full text