The 21 April, 2021 marked the 205th anniversary of the birth of author Charlotte Brontë, famous for writing Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.

On the anniversary, Monica Kendall, who lives in Dolgellau and is doing a PhD at the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University, published Lies and the Brontës: The Quest for the Jenkins Family.

Her book, described as a quest, a biography and an occasional travel book, reveals insights into the background of Charlotte Brontë’s writing, not least the identification of one of her main characters.

On reading biographies of the Brontës, Monica discovered no one had researched the Jenkins family, from whom she is descended.

The Jenkins family knew the Brontës in Brussels and West Yorkshire. Evan Jenkins, who looked after the Brontë sisters in Brussels, was born on a derelict farm in Mid Wales. He went to Cambridge University and became chaplain to King Leopold I, Victoria and Albert’s uncle.

“Seven years ago I made the astonishing discovery that my Jenkins ancestors looked after Charlotte and Emily Brontë in Brussels in 1842 and 1843, and that my three times great-uncle had worked alongside their father, Patrick Brontë, in West Yorkshire,” Monica explained.

“Yet when I turned to the Brontë biographies I found to my horror that no one had researched them. So my quest began.”

She added: “All works on the Brontës give the wrong year dates for Evan and none give his wife’s first name, and yet it is so vital for really understanding an author’s works to know about the experiences they had and the people they knew.

“I doubted if any of the family would appear in Emily’s Wuthering Heights, but could I find glimpses of my family in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Shirley or, above all, Villette, which is Charlotte’s name for Brussels?

“All that was known in my family was that Rev Evan Jenkins had gone to Cambridge University, became chaplain to King Leopold of the Belgians – the ‘dearest uncle’ of Victoria and Albert – and had been born ‘somewhere in Wales’.

“I turned first to the Alumni Cantabrigienses, but the entry for Evan Jenkins, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1817, was confused: either this Evan became rector in Dowlais (a virulently anti-Chartist who knew Lady Charlotte Guest well) or he became a chaplain in Brussels.

“The clergy database had my Evan Jenkins in Brussels, but dithered about whether he was at Oxford or Cambridge. But more importantly it recorded that he had been ordained by the Bishop of London.

“I was nervous looking at his bundles at the London Metropolitan Archives but what wondrous documents they can be! They were indeed the ordination bundles of my great-great-grandfather, graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, made deacon and then priest in 1825 to a curacy in Brussels. But even more exciting was his elder brother’s note of his birth: ‘1794, Novr. 19. Evan fil. Evan Jenkins Penycastell’.

“In the Cambridge admissions book Evan was noted as born in Aberystwyth, presumably the nearest large town. Where and what was Penycastell? A farmhouse or a village?

“I was then living in London, but that little notice of his birth led me on to so many adventures in Wales that I later moved to Gwynedd.

“I found miraculous survivals in the National Library of Wales, and on a gorgeous June morning I walked along the embankment of the Cors Caron from Tregaron to Evan’s famous school, Ystrad Meurig.

“Most movingly, after some hopeless map reading and fights with Welsh vegetation, I was invited in for a mug of tea in the farmhouse where Evan was born in 1794. The story of its discovery is in my book.

“On my quest for the Jenkins family, neglected by Brontë fabricators, I have found letters from Evan as far away (appropriately) as New South Wales. But my most precious memory is stumbling across Penycastell in old Cardiganshire, where my Jenkins family lived before one son did that amazing journey from a derelict tenant farm belonging to Nanteos to chaplain to a king across the water. The announcement of this royal honour of 1835 hangs now on a wall in Wales.”

Monica’s book is a fascinating read for the Victorian literary fan and student of the period.

It is available to pre-order from SilverWood Books, Central Books, Waterstones and Amazon.