The Brontë family misfortunes: curse or coincidence?

I have written elsewhere about the witch Biddy Iremonger, a major character in Wilkins’ Tooth aka Witch’s Business by Diana Wynne Jones. She deliberately puts a curse on the man she had intended to marry when he chooses someone else. This curse hits him and his family very hard: his wife has to go into a home for mentally ill people, and his pale, shabby, neglected children are considered peculiar, old fashioned and strange looking. 

Reading about the effects of her curse makes me feel very uncomfortable: it all reminds me very much of what happened to and in my own family after my step-mother left in a fury because of disappointed hopes.

It also reminds me of another family: that of Charlotte Brontë. 

The strange, old-fashioned appearance of the children, the unsuitable housing, the dreadful school, the suffering, the ill health, the blighted lives, the terrible state that Branwell Brontë was reduced to, the ‘too little too late’ successes and the untimely deaths have all been recorded in family letters and described by many biographers. Some of it is very familiar: once again my own family comes to mind.

The Biddy Iremonger story left me wondering whether there was someone who could have put a curse on the Brontë family. 

I refreshed my memory by re-reading some biographical material, and found a person of interest.