Women who world changed the
Charlotte Brontë: Novelist & Poet Morag Lindsay explores the life of the legendary female author.
BORN in Yorkshire in 1816 as the middle daughter in a respectable clergyman’s family, Charlotte Brontë was never destined to make waves.
Yet her reputation as one of literature’s most celebrated figures owes as much to talent and determination as it does to fate.
But the “Jane Eyre” author’s middle-daughter status was to be fleeting as, by the summer of 1825, she had lost both of her elder sisters to tuberculosis.
With no mother to guide them, Charlotte became a leader to the three younger siblings, Emily, Anne and the sole boy Branwell.
The girls were tutored at home, where they enjoyed the Yorkshire moors and their father’s library.
Rev. Patrick Brontë was the Cambridge-educated son of a poor Irish farmer and a published author and poet.
Young Charlotte may have inherited her ambitious streak from him.
Certainly her passion for spinning tall tales has been traced to a box of toy soldiers he brought home for Branwell in 1826.
The children used these characters to come up with their own plays, even writing tiny manuscripts for the soldiers to hold.
In adulthood, Charlotte became a teacher, although writing was what brought her satisfaction.
In 1846, the three Brontë sisters used a legacy from an aunt to publish a book of their poems, under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Charlotte’s first novel, “The Professor”, was rejected nine times, until one publisher said they’d be interested in reading anything else “Currer Bell” cared to send them.
She finished “Jane Eyre” in a matter of weeks, and the rest is history.
Charlotte’s study of morality and social class, with its bold intelligent heroine, was published on October 19, 1847.
Before her death in 1855, Charlotte wrote two more novels – “Shirley” in 1849 and “Villette” in 1853.
But it is “Jane Eyre” that cemented her place in history and continues to charm readers to this day.