Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was the author of Jane Eyre (1847), one of the most influential and beloved novels in English, and of Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). The daughter of a poor Irish-born clergyman in the moorland village of Haworth in Yorkshire, she grew up with her sisters Emily and Anne and her brother Branwell in a world of books and imagination, survived the deaths of her mother and two elder sisters, worked unhappily as a teacher and governess, fell hopelessly in love with a married professor in Brussels, and transformed these experiences into fiction of extraordinary intensity. Writing as “Currer Bell”, she gave the English novel a new voice: the passionate, rebellious, intensely private first-person narrative of a woman who demands to be treated as a full human being.

Life

Haworth

Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton, near Bradford, the third of six children of Patrick Brontë — born Patrick Brunty, the son of a poor farmer in County Down, who had won his way to Cambridge and ordination — and Maria Branwell from Cornwall. In 1820 the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, a bleak, overcrowded mill village on the edge of the moors, where the house looked over a crowded graveyard. Their mother died of cancer in 1821; her sister, Aunt Branwell, came to run the household.

In 1824 the four eldest girls were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, a cheap charitable school where conditions were harsh — cold, poor food, an epidemic of typhus. The two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent home with tuberculosis and died within weeks of each other in 1825. Charlotte, at nine, became the eldest. She later portrayed the school as Lowood in Jane Eyre, and Maria as the saintly Helen Burns.

The four surviving children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne — grew up largely together, reading everything in their father’s library and the magazines he took, and roaming the moors. In 1826 their father brought Branwell a box of toy soldiers, and the children invented a world for them. Charlotte and Branwell developed the kingdom of Angria in Africa; Emily and Anne the island of Gondal. For fifteen years they wrote sagas, poems, histories and magazines about these imaginary worlds in hundreds of tiny handmade books, in minuscule script, which survive today. The Angrian stories, with their Byronic hero the Duke of Zamorna, are full of passion, adultery and intrigue.

Teacher and governess

Charlotte went to Roe Head school in 1831, where she made lifelong friends (Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor), and returned there as a teacher in 1835–38, miserable and depressed, escaping into Angria. In 1837 she sent some poems to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, who replied kindly but firmly: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” She worked briefly as a governess for two families, and hated it — the governess was neither servant nor family member, isolated and humiliated. She refused two proposals of marriage, one from Ellen’s brother.

Brussels

To prepare to open their own school, Charlotte and Emily went in 1842 to study at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, a girls’ school run by Madame Claire Héger and her husband Constantin Héger, a brilliant, volatile teacher of literature. Charlotte returned alone in 1843 as a teacher, and fell deeply in love with Monsieur Héger, who was married. Madame Héger noticed; Charlotte, lonely and wretched, once confessed in desperation to a Catholic priest though she was a Protestant. She returned to Haworth in 1844 and wrote Héger anguished letters (“I tell you frankly that I have tried meanwhile to forget you… I have endured, Monsieur, all this year, this deprivation”). He did not reply; he tore them up, and his wife sewed them back together. Brussels became the material for The Professor and Villette.

Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

The school plan failed: no pupils came. Branwell, the family’s hope, had failed as a painter and been dismissed as a tutor after an affair with his employer’s wife; he declined into drink and opium. In 1845 Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems in a notebook and, overriding her sister’s fury, persuaded the three to publish a joint collection, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), choosing ambiguous names that kept their initials but concealed their sex, since, Charlotte later wrote, “we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” It sold two copies.

Each sister then wrote a novel. Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were accepted; Charlotte’s The Professor, based on Brussels, was rejected by six publishers. Undaunted, she wrote Jane Eyre in a year, while nursing her father after a cataract operation, and sent it to Smith, Elder & Co., who published it within two months, in October 1847. It was an immediate sensation; Thackeray, to whom the second edition was dedicated, sat up all night reading it. Speculation about “Currer Bell” was intense; was he a man or a woman, and was he the same person as Ellis and Acton? In 1848 Charlotte and Anne went to London to reveal themselves to the publisher George Smith.

Deaths

Then, in nine months, Charlotte lost all three siblings. Branwell died in September 1848 of tuberculosis aggravated by alcohol; Emily caught cold at his funeral and died in December, refusing all medical help; Anne died in May 1849 at Scarborough, where Charlotte had taken her for the sea air. Charlotte, alone with her father, finished Shirley (1849), a novel set during the Luddite riots of 1811–12 with a heroine partly based on Emily. She was now a celebrity in London, meeting Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell (who became her friend and biographer) and others, though painfully shy.

Villette (1853), drawing again on Brussels, is often thought her finest novel: the story, narrated by the reticent, repressed, unreliable Lucy Snowe, of a lonely Englishwoman teaching in a girls’ school in a foreign city, her unrequited love for a handsome doctor and her growing love for a fiery little professor, M. Paul Emanuel. Its ending is ambiguous: M. Paul sails for the West Indies and Lucy hints, without saying, that he drowned in a storm.

In 1854 Charlotte married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had loved her for years and whom her father had at first violently opposed. Their brief marriage was happier than she expected. In early 1855 she fell ill during pregnancy, with severe sickness, and died on 31 March 1855, aged thirty-eight. Her father outlived all six of his children. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) created the enduring legend of the tragic sisters of Haworth.

Art and themes

The first person. Jane Eyre and Villette are narrated by their heroines with an intensity of feeling that was new in English fiction — anger, hunger, longing, pride and loneliness expressed directly, “the truth of the heart”. Readers felt they were hearing a real voice; some found it shocking. Lady Eastlake, in the Quarterly Review, called Jane Eyre “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” with “a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor”.

Women’s lives. Brontë’s heroines are poor, plain, unprotected women who must earn their living in a society that offers them few roles and little dignity. They insist on their equality of soul. Jane’s declaration on the battlements at Thornfield is among the great feminist statements in literature: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.”

Passion and principle. Her novels dramatise the conflict between desire and conscience, love and self-respect. Jane leaves Rochester because she will not become his mistress, and refuses St John Rivers because she will not marry without love.

Imagination and realism. Brontë combines realistic social detail with Gothic elements — the madwoman in the attic, supernatural voices, dreams, the nun of Villette — and the romance of her Angrian youth, transformed.

Legacy

Jane Eyre has never been out of print and has inspired countless films, television series, plays and reworkings, notably Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which tells the story of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, a Creole heiress from Jamaica, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s study of women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Virginia Woolf admired her genius but regretted her anger. The Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth draws visitors from around the world.

In conversation

• “Reader, I married him” — the most famous sentence in Jane Eyre; any triumphant (or defiant) announcement.
• The madwoman in the attic — the hidden, repressed woman; a symbol of what respectable society locks away.
• “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me” — Jane’s assertion of free will.