Jane Eyre | Author Biography

Charlotte Brontë, born on April 21, 1816, was the third child of Maria Branwell Brontë and the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Originally of Irish descent, the Brontës moved to Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors, when Patrick Brontë was appointed rector of the Haworth parish church. The Haworth Parsonage, set high on a hill, overlooked the church graveyard on one side and the wild desolate moors of Yorkshire on the other.

Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë

It was in this environment that the six Brontë children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell (the only son), Emily, and Anne formed their own imaginary world, creating stories and poems inspired by a box of toy soldiers. The written word was valued in the Brontë household as the Reverend aspired to literary success, and the small library in his study was readily available to the children.

Tragedy struck the family early and persistently. Soon after the move to Haworth, Maria Branwell Brontë, exhausted from bearing six children in seven years, died of cancer after a long illness. Charlotte was only five years old.

The Reverend made several unsuccessful attempts to remarry, and eventually called his sister-in-law Elizabeth to Haworth to help raise the children.

In 1824, Maria, eleven years old, and Elizabeth, ten, were sent to a new school for the daughters of clergymen at Cowan Bridge. Charlotte, eight, and Emily, six, joined them that same year. Due to the unsanitary and harsh conditions of the school, a typhoid epidemic occurred. Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis. Charlotte and Emily were brought home immediately.

In 1831, Charlotte was again sent away to be educated–at Roe Head, an exclusive school fifteen miles from Haworth. After less than a year, she returned home to teach her sisters, then, in 1835, returned to Roe Head as a teacher, only to be called home again when Aunt Elizabeth died. For a brief time she worked as a governess, then returned home to Haworth, and for the next few years tutored her sisters, Emily and Anne, while continuing to write.

At the age of twenty–six, Charlotte, hoping to open her own school in Haworth, enrolled in a small private school in Brussels to study foreign languages. There she formed a one–sided romantic attachment to the married headmaster, Constantin Heger, and continued to write him letters after returning to England.

In 1846, after discovering that Emily and Anne had been writing poetry, Charlotte convinced her sisters to self–publish a book of their poems. Under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell, they published their first book of poems. Only two copies sold, but that did not deter them from each writing a novel. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published in 1847, followed by Anne’s Agnes Gray, and Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

Success came immediately to Charlotte, and she continued to write throughout her life. Shirley was published in 1849, Villette was published in 1853, and The Professor was published after her death, in 1857.

Unfortunately, Charlotte’s siblings Emily, Anne, and Branwell were all dead by 1849, and Charlotte was left alone at Haworth to care for her father. In 1852, Charlotte accepted a marriage proposal from her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, and continued to live at Haworth. In 1855, pregnant with her first child, Charlotte caught a chill while walking on the moors, and died on March 31, at the age of thirty-nine.