Anne Brontë serves a twofold purpose in the study of what the Brontës wrote and were. In the first place her gentle and delicate presence her sad short story her hard life and early death enter deeply into the poetry and tragedy that have always been entwined with the memory of the Brontës as women and as writers; in the second the books and poems that she wrote serve as matter of comparison by which to test the greatness of her two sisters. She is the measure of their genius like them yet not with them.