Charlotte Brontë

Born on April 21, 1816, in the village of Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of an Anglican curate and a mother who died when Charlotte was five, Bronte grew up in the parsonage at Haworth on the edge of the moors with her sisters Emily and Anne, her brother Branwell, and a devoutly Methodist aunt who raised them. At eight she was sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis and died, an experience she would recreate as the brutal Lowood School in Jane Eyre. The surviving children retreated into elaborate fantasy worlds, filling tiny handmade books with microscopic script. Charlotte worked as a governess and a teacher in Brussels, where she fell painfully and unrequitedly in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger. In 1846 the three sisters published a volume of poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; it sold two copies. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was rejected, but Jane Eyre (1847) was an immediate sensation. Then catastrophe struck in rapid succession: Branwell died in September 1848, Emily in December, Anne in May 1849. Charlotte finished Shirley (1849) and wrote Villette (1853) in near-total solitude. She married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in June 1854, became pregnant, and died on March 31, 1855, at thirty-eight, likely of severe hyperemesis gravidarum, destroyed, in the end, by the creation of new life.