Charlotte Brontë
1 book analyzed
Biography
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was the third daughter of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born curate at Haworth Parsonage in the West Riding of Yorkshire. She and her sisters Emily and Anne grew up on the edge of the moors with their brilliant, doomed brother Branwell. Their mother died when Charlotte was five; their two elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis contracted at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge — the model for Lowood. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were recalled from the school and educated largely at home, where they developed a rich shared fantasy life: the elaborate fictional worlds of Glass Town and Angria (Charlotte and Branwell's) and Gondal (Emily and Anne's). All three sisters published in 1847 under male pseudonyms to secure fair critical treatment: Charlotte as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell, Anne as Acton Bell. Jane Eyre was an immediate success. Charlotte was widely assumed to be male. When she and Anne went to her publisher Smith, Elder in London to prove their identities, they arrived unannounced and were taken for provincial country girls who couldn't possibly be the Bells. Charlotte outlived her sisters — Anne died in 1849, Emily in 1848, Branwell in 1848 — and her father. She married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died the following year, probably of hyperemesis gravidarum during pregnancy, at thirty-eight.