Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1816, the third of six children of an Irish-born clergyman. The family moved to Haworth, where her mother died in 1821. Her two older sisters died of tuberculosis after time at a harsh boarding school, which she later used as the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.

At the parsonage, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote stories about them. Charlotte worked as a teacher and governess and studied in Brussels. In 1846 the three sisters published a book of poems under the male names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Jane Eyre (1847) is narrated by an orphan who becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, falls in love with its owner, Mr. Rochester, and discovers his secret. Its frank first-person voice and its demand that a woman be treated as a man's equal made it an immediate success. In 1848 and 1849 Branwell, Emily and Anne all died. Charlotte wrote Shirley and Villette, married in 1854 and died during pregnancy in 1855, aged 38.