Westminster Abbey’s Brontë Plaque had a typo for 85 years. It’s fixed now

For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.

Last week, the error was fixed when the diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about onethird of an inch in diameter — were added above each E of the famous last name. It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.

“Those three women fought harder than most to have their voices heard, to have their work understood on its own merits, and it endures,” said Sharon Wright, who discovered the mistake while visiting Westminster Abbey in London in January. “We can at least get their names right.”

Wright, who describes herself as a stroppy Yorkshire woman like the literary sisters, was researching her upcoming book “The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar,” when she visited the plaque. Wright, who also edits the Brontë Society Gazette, a periodical for Brontë fans, compared the plaque with how the women had signed their own names, and saw the discrepancy.

“Three of our greatest writers, and their names are spelled incorrectly,” Wright said at the abbey on Friday. “You can’t make it up.” She promptly emailed the Abbey’s dean, and he responded by the next morning. In a matter of months, the plaque was amended.

Now, the punctuation indicates that the last vowel is pronounced separately: “BRON-tay” rather than “BRONT” or “BRUNT.” But the accent mark was actually the result of some poetic license by the writers’ father, Patrick Brontë.

Originally Patrick Brunty, he made the change upon arriving at Cambridge University as a student, in an effort to indicate a higher social standing and eschew prejudice against his Irish roots, said Sandie Byrne, a professor of English at the University of Oxford.

The Westminster Abbey plaque itself is made from Huddlestone, a cream-colored stone quarried in Yorkshire, the area of northern England where the sisters lived and wrote the books that would become part of the English language’s literary canon. It was commissioned in 1939 by the Brontë Society, a group dedicated to preserving the sisters’ legacy.

A letter from the time includes the correct spelling of Brontë, according to an excerpt released by Westminster Abbey on Thursday. Wright believes the error was introduced by the surveyor, whose correspondence about the planned plaque misspelled the name.

The error may have initially gone unnoticed because no formal ceremony was held to unveil the plaque.

World War II had broken out, and Paul de Labilliere, who was dean of Westminster, wrote at the time that “anything of that sort is out of the question,” according to the abbey.

These days, the Brontë sisters’ plaque sits at the heel of a life-size statue of William Shakespeare.

Nearby is a bust of Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate during the Brontës’ lifetime, who had discouraged Charlotte Brontë from pursuing a writing career. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” he wrote in a letter to Brontë after sampling her writing, “and it ought not to be.” Only a handful of women are among the more than 100 writers honored in the abbey. To the left of Shakespeare, Jane Austen has a modest plaque, and George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) is around the corner.

An inscription on the Brontës’ plaque, “With Courage To Endure,” is a testament to the sisters’ arduous journey to publication in the early 19th century. They used the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell to avoid being dismissed for their gender. It was only after Emily’s and Anne’s deaths that Charlotte revealed their identities.

On Friday, a day after Westminster Abbey unveiled the amended plaque, hundreds of visitors filed into Poets’ Corner, as they do each day. Most aimed their cameras at the Shakespeare statue or posed by William Wordsworth, and tour guides pointed out the plaque for actor Laurence Olivier, a more recent name.

After the grammatical tweak, though, guides had a novel reason to bring attention to the Brontë sisters.

“They’re in the shadow, and you’d have to take them over to point them out,” said Nick Morrison, who has led tours through the abbey for 23 years. “Now that we’ve got a good excuse to go over, it’s great.”