Biographie de Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was born at Thornton, Yorkshire in t816, the third child of Patrick and Maria Brontë. Her father was perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire, from 182o until his death in t861. Her mother died in 1824, leaving five daughters and a son. All of the girls except Anne were sent to a clergymen's daughters' boarding school (recalled as Lowood in Jane Eyre). The eldest sisters, Maria ("Helen Burns") and Elizabeth, became ill there, were taken home, and died soon after at Haworth.
Charlotte was employed as a teacher from 1835 to 1838, was subsequently a governess, and in 1842 went with her sister Emily to study languages in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger. Both sisters returned to Haworth when their aunt died, but Charlotte went back to the Pensionnat as a teacher in 1843. Her low spirits and her loneliness there were exacerbated by Emily's absence and by her powerful and unrequited feelings for Monsieur Heger.
She returned to Haworth in the following year, and in 1846 there appeared Poems by Carrer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was rejected by several publishers, and was not published until 1857. Jane Eyre was published (under the pseudonym Currer Bell) in 1847 and achieved immediate success. In 1848 Branwell Brontë died, as did Emily before the end of the same year, and Anne in the following summer, so that Charlotte alone survived of the six children.
Shirley was published in 1849, and Villette in 1853, both pseudonymously ; although Correr Bell was identified as Charlotte Brontë soon after Shirley appeared. In 1854, Charlotte married her father's curate, the Revd A. B. Nicholls, whose passionate attachment to her won her over despite her father's objections. She died in March 1855, a few weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, probably of complications associated with early pregnancy.
Margaret Smith is the editor of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (3 vols., 1995-2004). Herbert Rosengarten teaches English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Janet Gezari is Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of English at Connecticut College. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct : The Author and the Body at Risk (1992) and Last Things : Emily Brontë's Poems (2007).
