Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell, outlived her five siblings, and died pregnant at thirty-eight after nine months of marriage. She was the third of six children of an Irish clergyman at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors; her mother died when she was five and her two eldest sisters died of tuberculosis contracted at a school she later put into a novel as Lowood. The surviving four children invented the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal and wrote them up in miniature books for years, which is the most thorough literary apprenticeship any of them had. She worked as a governess and hated it, and spent two spells in Brussels at a school where she fell in love with the married proprietor, Constantin Heger, and wrote him letters he tore up and his wife stitched back together. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and sold immediately; its first-person voice, plain heroine and open anger at what a dependent woman was permitted were what shocked people, more than the madwoman. Shirley and Villette followed. Branwell, Emily and Anne all died within nine months of each other in 1848-49, and she finished Shirley alone in the house. Jane Eyre was widely assumed to have been written by a man, and the second edition was dedicated to Thackeray, who turned out to have a mad wife of his own, which caused talk she had not intended. Her publisher George Smith brought her to London and she met Thackeray and Harriet Martineau. She refused four proposals before accepting her father s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854. She died in March 1855 of hyperemesis in early pregnancy. Elizabeth Gaskell s life of her appeared two years later and shaped everything written since.

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