Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) is the English novelist of Jane Eyre, published in 1847 under the name Currer Bell. The eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived childhood, she grew up in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors and gave the novel one of its most passionate first-person voices: a poor, plain and independent governess. She also wrote Shirley and Villette.
Haworth parsonage
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born clergyman, and Maria Branwell. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, a village on the edge of the moors, where Patrick was perpetual curate. Their mother died the following year.
In 1824 Charlotte and three of her sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where the food was poor and discipline harsh. Her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, fell ill there and died in 1825. Charlotte later portrayed the school as Lowood in Jane Eyre, and Maria as the saintly Helen Burns.
Angria, Brussels and the governess years
At home the surviving children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, invented imaginary kingdoms, Angria and Gondal, and wrote hundreds of pages of stories in tiny handwriting, in little books small enough for toy soldiers. Charlotte worked as a teacher at Roe Head school and then as a governess, posts she found humiliating.
In 1842 she went with Emily to Brussels to study French at a boarding school run by Constantin Héger and his wife, returning alone in 1843 as a teacher. She fell unhappily in love with Héger, to whom she wrote letters he did not answer. The experience fed her novels The Professor and, later, Villette.
Currer Bell
In 1845 Charlotte found Emily's poems by chance and persuaded her sisters to publish a joint collection; Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in 1846, at their own expense, and sold two copies. They chose names with their own initials that could be taken for men's, because they suspected that books by women were judged differently.
Her first novel, The Professor, was rejected. Jane Eyre, accepted by Smith, Elder and Co., came out in October 1847 and was an immediate sensation. Readers debated whether Currer Bell was a man or a woman; in 1848 Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to prove to the publisher that the Bells were three different people.
Grief, marriage and death
Between September 1848 and May 1849 Charlotte lost her brother Branwell, then Emily, then Anne, all to illness. She wrote Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) in solitude, and began to visit literary London, where she met William Makepeace Thackeray and the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who became her friend.
In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died on 31 March 1855, a few weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, probably from complications of early pregnancy. Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) created the legend of the sisters of Haworth.
Anecdotes
Two copies sold
The sisters' first book, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, cost them about thirty-one pounds to publish in 1846. A year later it had sold two copies. Charlotte sent copies to several famous writers, including Wordsworth and Tennyson, with a letter mentioning the book's lack of success.
Thackeray's dedication
Charlotte admired William Makepeace Thackeray and dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. She did not know that Thackeray, like the novel's hero, had a wife who suffered from mental illness and lived apart from him. Gossip soon suggested that the governess author must have been in his household, which embarrassed them both.
Not a woman's business
In 1837 Charlotte sent some poems to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, asking his opinion. He replied that literature could not be the business of a woman's life, and ought not to be. She kept his letter and wrote on the envelope that it was to be kept for ever.
Frequently asked questions
What did Charlotte Brontë write?
Four novels: Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853) and The Professor, her first, published after her death in 1857, as well as poems and a large body of juvenile writings.
Why did the Brontë sisters use pen names?
Charlotte later explained that they chose ambiguous names, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, because they had noticed that critics judged women writers by different standards.
How did Charlotte Brontë die?
She died on 31 March 1855, aged thirty-eight, probably from severe sickness in early pregnancy, though tuberculosis has also been suggested.