Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, whose novels became classics of English literature.

Charlotte Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England.  Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria had 6 children.

In 1820 her family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth.

Maria died of cancer in 1821, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and a son, Branwell, to be taken care of by her sister, Elizabeth Branwell.

In August 1824, Patrick sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria and Elizabeth to a boarding school in Lancashire. The school's poor conditions affected her health and physical development. Her sisters Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815) both died of tuberculosis in June 1825.

After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school.

Brontë wrote her first known poem at the age of 13 in 1829, and was to go on to write more than 200 poems in the course of her life.

She and her surviving siblings – Branwell, Emily and Anne – created their own fictional worlds, and began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms. Charlotte and Branwell wrote Byronic stories about their jointly imagined country, Angria, and Emily and Anne wrote articles and poems about Gondal.

In 1831 Charlotte became a pupil at the school at Roe Head, but she left school the following year to teach her sisters at home.

In 1833 she wrote a novella, The Green Dwarf, using the name Wellesley.

Around about 1833, her stories shifted from tales of the supernatural to more realistic stories. She returned to Roe Head as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. Unhappy and lonely as a teacher at Roe Head, Brontë took out her sorrows in poetry, writing a series of melancholic poems.

In December 1836 she wrote to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey asking him for encouragement of her career as a poet.

Southey replied, famously, that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation." This advice she respected, but did not follow.

In 1839 she accepted a position as governess in the Sedgewick family, but left after three months and returned to Haworth. One of her charges was John Benson Sidgwick, an unruly child who on one occasion threw a Bible at Charlotte, an incident that may have been the inspiration for a part of the opening chapter of Jane Eyre in which John Reed throws a book at the young Jane.

John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and a strong dislike for me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he made me feel, because I was helpless to do anything about his threat or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my side against him, and Mrs Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.

Brontë was of slight build and was less than five feet tall.

In 1842 Charlotte and Emily travelled to Brussels to enroll at the boarding school.

Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music. Their time at the school was cut short when their aunt Elizabeth Branwell died in October 1842. Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843 to take up a teaching post at the school. Her second stay was not happy. She returned to Haworth in January 1844.

In May 1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poems under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

The pseudonyms veiled the sisters' sex while preserving their initials; thus Charlotte was Currer Bell.

Although only two copies of the collection of poems were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their pseudonyms when sending manuscripts to publishers.

Brontë's first manuscript, The Professor, wasn’t successful. It was published only after her death in 1857.

Brontë finished a second manuscript in August 1847. Six weeks later, Jane Eyre was published.

It tells the story of a plain governess, Jane, who, after difficulties in her early life, falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester. They marry, but only after Rochester's insane first wife, of whom Jane initially has no knowledge, dies in a dramatic house fire.

Jane Eyre had immediate commercial success and initially received favourable reviews. A talented amateur artist, Brontë personally did the drawings for the second edition of Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre has been made into several successful films and TV series and is one of the most well-known and best loved books in English literature.

In 1848 Brontë began work on her second novel, Shirley.

It was only partially completed when the Brontë family suffered the deaths of three of its members within eight months. In September 1848 Branwell died of chronic bronchitis. Emily became seriously ill shortly after his funeral and died of tuberculosis in December 1848. Anne died of the same disease in May 1849.

Brontë was unable to write at this time.

After Anne's death Brontë resumed writing as a way of dealing with her grief, and Shirley was published in October 1849. Unlike Jane Eyre, which is written in the first person, Shirley is written in the third person and lacks the emotional immediacy of her first novel, and reviewers found it less shocking.

In view of the success of her novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Brontë was persuaded by her publisher to make occasional visits to London, where she revealed her true identity, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, and acquainted with William Thackeray and G.H. Lewes. She never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time, as she did not want to leave her ageing father.

Brontë's third novel, the last published in her lifetime, was Villette, which appeared in 1853. Its main character, Lucy Snowe, travels abroad to teach in a boarding school in the fictional town of Villette, where she encounters a culture and religion different from her own, and falls in love with a man (Paul Emanuel) whom she cannot marry. Her experiences result in a breakdown but eventually she achieves independence and fulfilment through running her own school.

Before the publication of Villette, Brontë received an expected proposal of marriage from Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, who had long been in love with her.

She initially turned down his proposal and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls's poor financial status. Brontë meanwhile was increasingly attracted to Nicholls and by January 1854 she had accepted his proposal.

By all accounts, her marriage was a success and Brontë found herself very happy in a way that was new to her.

Brontë became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and she died, with her unborn child, on 31 March 1855.