Charlotte Brontë (1816 - 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood. Her novel Jane Eyre (1847), published under the pen name Currer Bell, was an immediate success and remains a central work of nineteenth-century English fiction, followed by Shirley and Villette. [1]
Early life
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman of Irish birth, and Maria Branwell. In 1820 the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, on the edge of the moors, where Charlotte spent almost her whole life. Her mother died the following year. [1]
In 1824 she and three sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where conditions were harsh; the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted illness there and died in 1825. The school later supplied the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre. Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn, and the surviving children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, were largely educated at home. [2]
Juvenilia and employment
The four children invented elaborate imaginary kingdoms, Angria and Gondal, recording their histories in tiny hand-sewn books; this juvenilia, written over more than a decade, constitutes an unusually large surviving body of childhood writing. [1]
Charlotte worked as a teacher at Roe Head School and then as a governess in private households, occupations she found uncongenial. In 1842 she and Emily travelled to Brussels to study at the Pensionnat Heger in order to qualify to open a school of their own. Charlotte returned alone the following year as a teacher; her attachment to the school's proprietor, Constantin Heger, and the unhappiness of that second year fed directly into her later novels. [2]
Publication
In 1846 the three sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell at their own expense, adopting ambiguous pen names to avoid the prejudice they expected against women writers. The volume sold two copies. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers and appeared only posthumously. [1]
Jane Eyre was accepted by Smith, Elder and Co. and published in October 1847 to rapid success. Its first-person narrative of a plain, poor, self-possessed governess who insists on her moral equality with her employer was widely admired and, in some quarters, condemned as coarse and unfeminine. [3]
Loss and later work
Between September 1848 and May 1849 Branwell, Emily and Anne all died, leaving Charlotte alone with her father. She completed Shirley (1849), a novel of the Luddite disturbances in Yorkshire, during this period, and published Villette in 1853, drawing on her Brussels years. Her identity as author became known, and she made visits to London where she met W. M. Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell. [1]
In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died at Haworth on 31 March 1855, while pregnant, at the age of thirty-eight. [2]
Legacy
Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) established the family's story in the public imagination and shaped its reception for a century. Jane Eyre has never been out of print and has been adapted repeatedly for stage and screen; the Haworth parsonage is preserved as the Brontë Parsonage Museum. [4]
