Charlotte Brontë was four in 1820 when the Rev Patrick Brontë brought his wife and six children to live in Haworth in West Yorkshire. The Parsonage and surrounding moorlands were to nurture the Brontë children’s remarkable fiction and poetry, including Charlotte’s Jane Eyre , one of the milestones of nineteenth-century fiction....
Soon after arriving in Haworth, Charlotte’s mother died and her unmarried aunt Elizabeth came to look after the household. The four eldest girls were sent as boarders to the grim Clergy Daughters’ School in Lancashire, where Charlotte’s older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth became ill; both died at home in 1825. Charlotte and Emily also returned to Haworth and, with Branwell and Anne, began their childhood years of intensive reading, writing and storytelling.
In 1831 Charlotte went to Miss Wooler’s School near Huddersfield to finish her education, but after leaving, and needing the income to support her increasingly dissolute brother, she went back as a teacher. Another spell as a governess followed, but Charlotte and Emily wanted to open their own school and, to that end, they went to study languages in Brussels at Pensionnat Héger. Charlotte’s two years there were a critical period in her intellectual, creative and emotional life: aside of gathering literary resources, she had formed a deep attachment to M Constantin Héger, but her feelings were never reciprocated.
Back in Yorkshire, the sisters’ hopes for a school came to nothing, yet Charlotte’s ambition for a life beyond teaching was undiminished and she led the project to publish her own and her sisters’ poetry. Poems by Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in 1845; it failed to find readers, but emboldened the Brontës to publish their novels. Charlotte had already written The Professor, based on her experience in Brussels; it was refused by publishers while Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were accepted.
Undeterred by that disappointment, Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre and completed it within a year. On publication in 1848, the novel met with immediate success but also controversy: some critics found its raw emotion and realism ‘coarse’, and the narrator being a lowly governess was a shock to mid-nineteenth-century sensibilities.
By the following summer, Charlotte’s wayward brother Branwell was dead and her sisters had both died of tuberculosis; her aunt had died some years before and, alone in the Parsonage, she wrote Shirley , a novel of loneliness, and Villette . After the success of Jane Eyre , Charlotte was well-known in literary society, but shied away from celebrity. On visits to London she met Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell, who became her friend and future biographer, but for the most part Charlotte remained in Haworth.
In 1854 she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, and they lived in the Parsonage with her ageing father. The strongest and most outgoing of the Brontës, Charlotte outlived her siblings, yet the early stages of pregnancy proved too exhausting for her and she died in 1855.
