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Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816–31 March 1855) is one of the most famous Victorian women writers and poets. She was the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She originally published her works under the name of Currer Bell, along with her sisters, who also had pseudonyms, but they admitted to them in 1848 and were celebrated in London literary circles.
She was the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish crofter’s son who rose via a Cambridge education to become, in 1820, a perpetual curate at Haworth, in Yorkshire. Charlotte was only five in 1821 when her mother Maria died. Four years later, her two older sisters died as a result of the harsh conditions in the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, to which they and the eight-year-old Charlotte were sent in 1824. Charlotte’s experiences at the school influenced her portrayal of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. After the deaths of the two oldest Brontë daughters, Patrick and Maria’s sister Elizabeth gave the children a stimulating and wide-ranging education at home. Charlotte, her two younger sisters Anne and Emily Brontë, and their brilliant, unstable brother Branwell invented complex imaginary worlds, which they wrote extensively about in tiny homemade books–a fruitful literary apprenticeship. At age, 15, Charlotte enrolled at a new school not far from Haworth. Roe Head School was less harsh than the Clergy Daughters’ School, but Charlotte spent only 18 months there before returning home.
As an adult, Charlotte worked as a governess and spent some years teaching at a boarding school in Brussels. It was the passion and rebellion of Jane Eyre (1847) that earned her fame, and when visiting London, she moved in the best literary circles, befriended by Mrs Gaskell and Thackeray, the latter remembered ‘the trembling little frame, the little hands, the great honest eyes’. Shirley (1849), written during and after the tragic deaths of her three siblings within a single year, displayed Charlotte’s engagement with both women’s rights and radical workers’ movements.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre opens with Jane, an orphaned, isolated ten-year-old living with a family that dislikes her. She grows in strength, excels at school, becomes a governess, and falls in love with Edward Rochester. After being deceived by him, Jane goes to Marsh End, where she regains her spirituality and discovers her own strength. By the novel’s end, Jane is a strong, independent woman. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre still raises relevant questions for readers today.
In June 1854, Charlotte Brontë married her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, who had long been a loyal suitor. In 1854, Charlotte, in the early stages of pregnancy, caught pneumonia while on a long, rain-drenched walk on the moors. She died on March 31, 1855, a month before her thirty-ninth birthday. The Professor, written in 1846 and 1847, was posthumously published in 1857, along with Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë.