Charlotte Brontë

Life

Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born clergyman, and his wife Maria. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, a village on the edge of the moors, where Patrick had been appointed curate. Maria died the following year, and in 1825 the two eldest daughters died after falling ill at a school for clergymen’s daughters that Charlotte also attended. Charlotte, her sisters Emily and Anne, and her brother Branwell grew up at the parsonage, writing elaborate stories about imaginary kingdoms.

She worked as a teacher and a governess, jobs she disliked, and in 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to study languages at a boarding school run by Constantin Héger and his wife. Her unreturned attachment to Héger shaped her later novels. In 1846 the three sisters published a volume of poems under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, which sold almost nothing. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers, but her second, Jane Eyre (1847), was accepted quickly and became a success.

Between 1848 and 1849 Branwell, Emily, and Anne all died, leaving Charlotte alone with her father. She published Shirley in 1849 and Villette in 1853, became a modest literary celebrity in London, and in 1854 married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died the following year, during pregnancy, at the age of thirty-eight.

Literary significance

Brontë brought a new kind of narrator into English fiction: a woman of no social standing who speaks directly to the reader about her feelings, her anger, and her sense of her own worth. Jane Eyre combined realism about class and work with elements of gothic romance, and the combination has been imitated ever since. Her novels were controversial on publication for their frankness about women’s inner lives, and they were central to later feminist readings of the Victorian novel. Villette, her last completed book, is regarded by many critics as her finest.

Where to start

Jane Eyre is the natural entry point and the book for which she is known. Readers who want a comparison with her sister’s work can go on to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published the same year.