The first name of the Brontë sisters' mother was Maria. She was Maria Branwell before her marriage to Patrick Brontë and is often identified as Maria Branwell in biographical accounts of the family.
Maria was born in Cornwall and married the Irish clergyman Patrick Brontë in 1812. The couple had six children: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily, and Anne. The three youngest surviving children—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—later became the celebrated Brontë writers.
Maria Brontë died in 1821, when Anne was only about one year old. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, then moved into the Haworth parsonage and helped care for the children. Aunt Branwell became an important figure in the household and supported the children's education and imaginative writing.
A common mix-up is to mistake one of the daughters' names for their mother's. Charlotte and Anne were daughters, not the mother, while Elizabeth was both the name of one daughter and the name of Maria's sister, who helped raise the children. Maria's early death meant that the sisters grew up with little direct memory of their mother, though her family background remained part of their story.