Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, a village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Bronte, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, and his Cornish wife Maria Branwell Bronte ^[1]. In 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, where Patrick had been appointed perpetual curate. The parsonage there, set between the church and the open moorland, became the fixed center of Charlotte's life. Her mother died of illness in September 1821, when Charlotte was five, and her aunt Elizabeth Branwell came from Cornwall to help raise the children ^[1].

In 1824 Charlotte was sent with three of her sisters to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Conditions were harsh: the food was poor, the building cold, and discipline severe. Her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, fell ill there and died of tuberculosis in 1825, after which Patrick withdrew Charlotte and Emily ^[2]. The experience marked Charlotte deeply, and she later drew on Cowan Bridge for the grim Lowood school in Jane Eyre ^[2].

Back at Haworth, the four surviving children (Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne) educated themselves largely at home, reading widely in their father's library and in periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine. A box of toy soldiers given to Branwell in 1826 sparked an elaborate shared fantasy world. Charlotte and Branwell developed the imaginary kingdom of Angria, filling tiny hand-stitched booklets with stories, poems, and magazines written in minute script ^[3]. This juvenilia, produced over more than a decade, served as her apprenticeship in fiction.

Anyone asking who was Charlotte Bronte before fame arrived would have found a schoolteacher and governess of modest means. In 1831 she enrolled at Roe Head school near Mirfield, where she met her lifelong friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838 ^[1]. She then took posts as a private governess with the Sidgwick family in 1839 and the White family in 1841, work she found isolating and often humiliating. Those years supplied much of the social observation that later animated her novels ^[2].

Hoping to open a school of their own at the parsonage, Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels in 1842 to improve their French at the Pensionnat Heger, a boarding school run by Constantin Heger and his wife Claire ^[1]. Charlotte returned alone in 1843 as a pupil-teacher. She formed an intense, unreciprocated attachment to Constantin Heger, a married man whose intellect and teaching had a profound effect on her. Surviving letters she wrote to him after leaving Brussels in 1844 record her distress, and the episode later shaped the novels The Professor and Villette ^[4].

The planned school attracted no pupils. Then, in the autumn of 1845, Charlotte came across a notebook of Emily's poems and pressed her reluctant sisters into a joint publication. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in May 1846 at the sisters' own expense, under pseudonyms chosen to disguise their sex while keeping their initials. The volume sold only two copies, but it committed the three women to authorship ^[2].

Among Charlotte Bronte achievements, none matters more than Jane Eyre, published by Smith, Elder and Co. in October 1847 under the name Currer Bell. The novel, subtitled An Autobiography, tells the story of a plain, poor orphan who insists on her own moral worth, refuses to become the mistress of the man she loves, and marries him only as an equal. It was an immediate commercial and critical success, praised for its passion and directness even by reviewers uneasy about its supposed coarseness ^[2]. Her first completed novel, The Professor, had been rejected by publishers and appeared only after her death, in 1857 ^[1].

Jane Eyre's first-person narration, addressed intimately to the reader, gave English fiction a new kind of heroine: one who claims equality of soul across differences of wealth, rank, and beauty. Critics have long treated the novel as a landmark in the development of the psychological novel and in writing about women's independence ^[5].

Her second published novel, Shirley (1849), set among the Luddite disturbances of the Yorkshire woollen industry in 1811 and 1812, was written during the terrible period in which her three surviving siblings died. Villette (1853), based closely on her Brussels years, follows the lonely teacher Lucy Snowe and is regarded by many scholars as her most technically accomplished book ^[2]. After the deaths of Emily and Anne, Charlotte revealed the sisters' identities to her publisher, and by 1850 the secret of the Bells was effectively public. She edited a posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that year, adding a biographical notice of her sisters ^[1].

Charlotte was small in stature and short-sighted, and she was self-conscious about her plainness throughout her life. She lived almost entirely at the Haworth parsonage, keeping house with her sisters and caring for her aging father, whose eyesight was failing until a successful cataract operation in 1846 ^[1]. Fame brought her into London literary society in the early 1850s, where she met William Makepeace Thackeray, whom she admired and to whom she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre, and the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who became a friend ^[2].

She received several proposals of marriage. She turned down Henry Nussey, her friend Ellen's brother, in 1839, and declined others in later years, including an early offer from her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1852, a proposal her father strongly opposed ^[1]. Charlotte eventually accepted Nicholls, and the two married in Haworth church on June 29, 1854. By her own account in letters, the marriage brought her unexpected contentment during its brief course ^[4].

The family's private losses were relentless. Her brother Branwell, whose promise had collapsed into alcoholism and opium use, died in September 1848. Emily died of tuberculosis that December, and Anne died of the same disease at Scarborough in May 1849 ^[2]. Charlotte finished Shirley in a house emptied of her siblings and lived thereafter with her father as her only close family at home.

The early 1850s brought Charlotte a measure of security. Villette appeared in January 1853 to strong reviews, and her publisher George Smith remained a supportive correspondent, though their relationship cooled after his engagement to another woman ^[2]. At Haworth she began a new novel, Emma, of which only a fragment survives; it was published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860 with an introduction by Thackeray ^[1].

Her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls in June 1854 was followed within months by pregnancy and rapidly declining health. Through the winter of 1854 to 1855 she suffered constant nausea and could keep down little food, a condition many modern commentators associate with hyperemesis gravidarum, severe vomiting in pregnancy, though her death certificate recorded phthisis, the Victorian term for tuberculosis ^[6]. She died at the parsonage on March 31, 1855, three weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, and was buried in the family vault in St Michael and All Angels church at Haworth ^[1].

Her father outlived all six of his children, dying in 1861. Two years after Charlotte's death, at Patrick Bronte's request, Elizabeth Gaskell published The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), a full biography that fixed the image of the sisters' isolated moorland lives in the public mind and remains a foundational, if partial, source ^[7].

Any Charlotte Bronte biography has to reckon with the scale of her afterlife. Jane Eyre has never been out of print since 1847 and has been adapted for stage, film, radio, and television scores of times. Its influence runs through later fiction, most visibly in Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story from the perspective of Bertha Mason, the first Mrs Rochester ^[5]. Feminist critics of the twentieth century, notably Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), placed Bronte at the center of debates about women's writing and Victorian constraint ^[5].

The Haworth parsonage where she lived and wrote is now the Bronte Parsonage Museum, run by the Bronte Society, which was founded in 1893 and is among the oldest literary societies in the world. The museum holds manuscripts, letters, and the miniature Angria booklets, and it draws visitors from around the world to the village ^[3]. In 1902 a memorial to the three sisters was placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey ^[8].

Among the enduring Charlotte Bronte facts is a simple one: a clergyman's daughter with no fortune, writing from a remote Yorkshire village, produced one of the most widely read novels in English. Her insistence that an obscure woman's feelings deserved the full weight of serious fiction changed the possibilities of the form, and each generation of readers continues to find in Jane Eyre a voice that speaks directly to them ^[2].