Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë the English novelist and poet (1816-1855) whose novel Jane Eyre transformed the depiction of the inner life of a woman in fiction and who, with her sisters, produced some of the most powerful writing of the Victorian age.

Family and Childhood

Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton in Yorkshire, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman of Irish origin, and Maria Branwell. Soon after her birth the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, a village on the edge of the moors, where the children grew up amid a harsh climate and a landscape of heather and stone that left a deep mark on their imaginations.

Their mother died in 1821, and the children were raised largely by an aunt and by their father. In 1824 Charlotte and three of her sisters were sent to a school for the daughters of clergymen at Cowan Bridge, a grim institution whose poor conditions and early deaths of two of the sisters contributed to the illness and death of the eldest girls. This experience, and the loss of her sisters, supplied material for the Lowood school of Jane Eyre.

The surviving children, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell, were unusually gifted and formed a close, inward-looking world of their own. They read widely, wrote stories and poems, and invented elaborate imaginary kingdoms, Angria and Gondal, in which they set long narratives. This juvenile writing trained them in invention and in the discipline of sustained composition.

Teaching, Governessing and Publication

As the daughter of a clergyman without fortune, Charlotte had to earn a living, and she worked as a teacher and later as a governess, occupations that offered little independence and much tedium. In 1842 she and Emily travelled to Brussels to study languages at a school kept by Constantin Heger, an experience that gave her a command of French and provided the emotional material for her novels The Professor and Villette.

The sisters hoped to found a school and to support themselves by writing. In 1846 they published a joint volume of poems under the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, keeping their own names hidden because of the prejudice against women writers and because their work might be thought unfeminine. The volume sold poorly but encouraged them to seek publishers for their novels.

Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was rejected, but her second, Jane Eyre, was accepted and appeared in October 1847 under the name Currer Bell. It was an immediate success and provoked intense curiosity about the identity of its author, whose frank treatment of passion, conscience and a woman's desire for a life of her own startled readers of the day.

Jane Eyre and Its Heroine

Jane Eyre is narrated in the first person by its orphan heroine, who endures a loveless childhood, a harsh charity school and a position as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester. On the day of their wedding she discovers that he is already married to a woman kept hidden in the house, and she flees rather than become his mistress, refusing to compromise her principles even at the cost of her happiness.

The novel is remarkable for the intensity of Jane's voice and for its insistence that a woman of no fortune, no beauty and no family has an inner life worth recording. Her declaration that she is a free human being with an independent will, and her demand for equality with the man she loves, gave the book a moral force that readers have felt ever since. The story ends with Jane's independence secured and her union with Rochester made possible on her own terms.

The novel blends elements of Gothic fiction, autobiography, romance and social criticism. The madwoman in the attic, the mysterious house and the fiery imagery have been endlessly analysed, and the book has been read as a study of class, of religion and of the position of women. Its influence on later fiction and on the wider culture has been immense.

Later Novels and the Loss of Her Siblings

The years after Jane Eyre were darkened by the deaths of her brother Branwell and of her sisters Emily and Anne within a short space of time in 1848 and 1849. Charlotte was left alone with her father, and she turned to writing as a consolation and a duty. Her novel Shirley appeared in 1849 and deals with the industrial unrest of the Napoleonic era and with the lives of two very different heroines.

Villette, published in 1853, is perhaps her most subtle and most deeply felt novel. It draws on her time in Brussels and tells the story of Lucy Snowe, an Englishwoman who teaches in a foreign city and who is denied the happiness she seeks. The book is restrained and inward, and many critics consider it her finest achievement, more controlled than Jane Eyre and even more penetrating in its account of loneliness and self-command.

She also wrote The Professor, published after her death, and left an unfinished novel, Emma. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, but the marriage was brief; she became pregnant and died on 31 March 1855, probably of complications of pregnancy. Her short life produced a body of work out of proportion to its length.

Influence and Reputation

Charlotte Brontë's novels gave Victorian fiction a new kind of heroine and a new interiority. Jane Eyre showed that the ordinary life of a plain, strong-willed woman could carry the weight of a great novel, and its first-person voice influenced generations of writers who followed. Her treatment of passion and principle, and her refusal to separate love from moral equality, gave the novel a psychological seriousness that has never gone out of date.

Together with her sisters she has become a central figure in English literary history. The three sisters, writing in a remote parsonage and publishing under male pseudonyms, produced some of the most original work of the century, and their lives have themselves become a subject of lasting fascination. The Brontë Society and the parsonage museum at Haworth preserve their memory.

Her reputation rests chiefly on Jane Eyre, a book that has been adapted for stage and screen many times and translated into almost every language. Yet Villette and Shirley continue to be read and admired, and her poetry and her letters add to the picture of a formidable intelligence. She is remembered as a writer who enlarged the range of what the novel could say about a woman's inner life and who did so against almost every obstacle her circumstances could raise.

See also

• Jane Eyre
• Emily Brontë
• Villette
• Brontë family