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Charlotte Bronte

© Megan Drummond

Charlotte Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England.

She was eight years old when her mother passed away in 1824, leaving her father, the rector of Haworth, to raise five daughters and a son alone. Charlotte and her sister Emily, then six, were sent to Cowan Bridge to attend the Clergy’s Daughters School with their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth. The older sisters were sent home with illness soon after Charlotte’s arrival and both died in 1825. Charlotte and her sister were sent home soon after the deaths.

Although it is doubtful that she recognized it at the time, her sisters’ illness and the grim conditions of the school were feeding Charlotte’s literary muse. The school was the original model for the infamous Lowood School in her novel Jane Eyre (1847). Charlotte’s imagination began showing when she arrived home. The Bronte siblings transformed a set of wooden soldiers into the characters of two imaginary kingdoms – Angria, owned by Charlotte and her brother Branwell and Gondal, which belonged to Emily and their youngest sister Anne. A hundred volumes of the chronicles of Angria, started by 19-year-old Charlotte in 1829, still survive.

In 1831, Charlotte went away to Miss Wooler’s School in Roe Head for a year of schooling. She returned home after a year to continue her own education and to teach her sisters what she had learned. Charlotte returned, as a teacher, to Roe Head for three years, taking Emily with her. With the idea of opening their own small private school, Charlotte and Emily went to a private boarding school in Brussels in 1842. The death of their aunt, who had been acting as housekeeper for the family, prompted the sisters' return to Hawthorn.

When Charlotte returned to Brussels, it was without Emily. Her experiences as a lone English woman in a foreign country supplied her with the material she would need to so realistically portray the loneliness and isolation of Lucy Snowe, the central character in her 1853 novel Villette.

By 1849, Charlotte was the only remaining Bronte sibling. Alone in the house with only her father, she resumed working on Shirley (1849), the least successful of her novels. She married her father’s assistant, Albert Bell Nicholls on June 29, 1854. The couple had a happy but short-lived marriage.

Charlotte Bronte was carrying their first child when she died of tuberculosis on March 31, 1855, at the age of 39.

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