St George's House, where Patrick
Brontë met Mary Burder in 1807

A CHANCE encounter in a Wethersfield kitchen in 1807 almost changed the face of English literature.
When Patrick Brontë, the poorly paid and poorly respected curate of St Mary Magdalene walked into the room in St George’s House where his landlady’s eligible young niece Mary Burder was preparing dinner he was instantly smitten.
Had the course of true love run smooth perhaps the world would never have had “Jane Eyre”, “Wuthering Heights” or “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” for Patrick might never have become the father of novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. As it was, the romance between the impecunious red-haired Irishman, already aged 30, who had gained his BA at St. John’s College Cambridge through hard graft and the help of some well-placed friends and the 18-year-old daughter of a prosperous local farming family, never ended in marriage.
No-one is quite sure why. Not even perhaps the enamoured couple themselves. The Congregational Chapel on

the other side of Wethersfield village green to the church could have had a lot to do with it.Mary Burder’s father had died just before Patrick’s arrival in Wethersfield and the responsibility for her widowed mother and the four children in the family had been taken by her uncle who lived not some miles away in Great Yeldham.
Mary’s father had been a churchman, though he shelled out a hundred pounds to help the case of the Congregational minister when he was arraigned, wrongly it transpired, for unmentionable crimes. Her uncle’s family were, however, non-conformists and didn’t look kindly on a match with an Anglican curate. That he was an Irishman didn’t help either. Mary, was whisked off to Great Yeldham.

The Congregational Chapel where Mary Burder worshipped