Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Nicholls, commonly known by her maiden name Charlotte Brontë, was an English novelist and poet born on 21 April 1816. She was the third of six children of Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë, and the elder sister of Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë. Her life belonged to the first half of the nineteenth century, much of it rooted in Yorkshire, where her father served as perpetual curate at St Michael and All Angels Church in Haworth.

Brontë is best known for Jane Eyre, first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The novel was a great success on publication, attracting both praise and controversy, and has since been acknowledged as a classic of English literature. Before that success, she and her sisters had published a collection of poems in 1846 under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Her first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers, but it grew from experiences that also fed into Jane Eyre.

The events that shaped Brontë began early. Her mother died in 1821, when Charlotte was only five, leaving the children in the care of their aunt Elizabeth Branwell. In 1824, Charlotte and three of her sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Conditions there were harsh, with poor food, insanitary conditions, and outbreaks of disease. Her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, became ill there and died shortly afterward. Charlotte later believed the school permanently damaged her own health, and she used it as the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

Education and work also shaped her imagination. She studied at Roe Head School in Mirfield in 1831, returned home to teach Emily and Anne, and later went back to Roe Head as a teacher. She worked briefly as a governess in 1839. In 1842, she went to the Heger Pensionnat in Brussels as a student and then as a teacher, hoping to gain the skills needed to open a school of her own. She left after falling in love with the school’s director, Constantin Heger, a married man, who inspired both Rochester in Jane Eyre and her first novel, The Professor.

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to open a school in Haworth, but they failed to attract pupils. Instead, their writing began to carry them outward. The sisters’ true identities were revealed in 1848, and by the following year Charlotte was known in London literary circles. In 1854, she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. She became pregnant soon after the wedding and died on 31 March 1855, possibly of tuberculosis, though there is evidence she may have died from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy. Her work still draws readers because it was made from lived experience: loss, discipline, ambition, work, secrecy, and the fierce wish to be heard.