Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born clergyman, and Maria Branwell. The family moved to Haworth when Charlotte was four, and that windswept moorland parsonage became the backdrop against which all three writing sisters would develop their extraordinary imaginations. Her mother died when Charlotte was five, and the children were largely left to each other and to books.

Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge when Charlotte was eight. The conditions there were brutal. Two of her elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, fell ill at the school and died shortly after returning home. The experience scarred Charlotte permanently and found its way, barely disguised, into the depiction of Lowood in Jane Eyre. Brocklehurst is widely understood to be based on the school's founder, William Carus Wilson.

Charlotte later worked as a teacher and as a governess, positions she found suffocating, and twice attempted to establish a school of her own, which never came to pass. She and Emily spent time in Brussels studying French at the Pensionnat Héger, where Charlotte fell deeply, hopelessly in love with her married teacher, Constantin Héger. He did not return the feeling. The experience fed directly into the Villette and to the dynamic between Jane and Rochester.

In 1846 the three sisters published a joint volume of poetry under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It sold two copies. Charlotte did not let this discourage her. Jane Eyre was published in October 1847 under the name Currer Bell and became an immediate sensation. Readers and critics speculated furiously about whether the author was male or female. The novel's direct, passionate female voice was unlike anything that had appeared before.

By the time Charlotte's true identity was revealed, she was already famous. But the years that followed were heartbreaking. Her brother Branwell died in September 1848. Emily died in December of the same year. Anne died the following May. Charlotte was left alone in the parsonage with her elderly father. She continued to write, producing Shirley in 1849 and Villette in 1853. She married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854. She died in March 1855, almost certainly from complications during pregnancy, at the age of thirty-eight.

Charlotte Brontë wrote four novels in her lifetime: The Professor (published posthumously in 1857), Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Of these, Jane Eyre remains her masterpiece and one of the most widely read novels in the English language. Her significance lies not only in the quality of the writing but in what she insisted on: that a plain, poor, unimportant woman's inner life was a fit subject for serious literature, and that a woman's desire for equality and dignity was not unreasonable but simply human.