Charlotte Brontë born 1816-1855

About:

Charlotte Brontë was born at Thornton, Yorkshire in 1816 to an Irish Anglican clergyman and his wife Maria Branwell. When Charlotte was four the family moved to the famed Parsonage at Haworth which was to prove so influential in her, and her siblings’ writing. A year later in 1921 her mother died of cancer leaving five girls and a boy to be brought up by her sister Elizabeth “Aunt Branwell”

The four eldest girls were sent away to school at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where amidst various privations the elder two Brontë daughters contracted tuberculosis and all four daughters were sent hurriedly back to Haworth where Charlotte’s two sisters died shortly afterwards. The four remaining siblings lived on at Haworth entertaining themselves with a progressively complicated imaginary land, based around Branwell’s wooden soldiers, called Angria.

Although Branwell descended into a Byronic decline fuelled by alcohol, Charlotte and her sisters, Emily and Anne began writing in earnest, although their early literary efforts were not well received. A volume of poetry published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell sold two copies. Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre, published in 1847 however was an immediate and public success. But Charlotte was to find the enjoyment of her literary celebrity short lived as the tragic tenor of her life continued with the death, due to drinking, of her beloved brother followed in the same year by the death of both her sisters, further victims of the lethal tuberculosis.

Charlotte continued writing from the Parsonage where she returned form the literary circles of London to look after her father. She married his curate in 1854 and died in the early stages of pregnancy in 1855, possibly from an excessive case of morning sickness, although her death certificate gives the almost inevitable verdict of tuberculosis.

Brontë was unlikely literary heroine, ‘A little plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid’, is how she was described to George Eliot. She was indeed very little; one of her dresses, preserved at the Parsonage would fit a modern day eleven year old. But her defiantly unglamorous and plain speaking style combined with the even more unusual heroines of her novels would change the literary world.