Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of a clergyman. She grew up in Haworth, a moorland village in West Yorkshire that figures — sometimes barely disguised, sometimes transformed — in the fiction of all three writing sisters. The childhood was both isolated and intensely imaginative: Charlotte and her sisters and brother Branwell created elaborate fictional worlds (Angria for Charlotte; Gondal for Emily and Anne) that they inhabited in notebooks and correspondence for years. The moors, the church, the village, the neighboring gentry houses — these formed the geography that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne would each transform into major fiction.

She attempted several careers open to women of her background: she worked as a governess (an experience she found humiliating and recorded in Jane Eyre) and she and Emily studied French in Brussels in 1842, where Charlotte fell in love with the married professor Constantin Héger, an attachment that he appears not to have reciprocated and that she struggled with for years. Her letters to Héger, which he tore up and his wife secretly preserved and sewed back together, were published in 1913 and remain some of the most painful unrequited love letters in the language.

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell and was immediately successful. Its innovation was its narrative voice: Jane speaks in the first person, directly to the reader, with a defiant clarity about her own experience — "Reader, I married him" — that had no precise precedent. She is poor, plain, alone, and refuses to be defined by any of these things. The novel's climax, when she discovers Rochester's existing wife locked in the attic, turns on a question that was genuinely urgent in 1847: what does a woman owe herself when the choice is between love and integrity? Jane's answer — she leaves — was not the answer Victorian novels usually gave.

Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) followed. Villette is the most personally revealing of her novels — its protagonist Lucy Snowe is alone in a Belgian city not unlike Brussels, and the novel's emotional interior, its unreliable narration and its refusal to reward its heroine with conventional happiness, has come to be seen as her most formally interesting work. She married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854, over her father's initial objection, and died in March 1855, shortly before her thirty-ninth birthday. She was probably pregnant; the cause is usually given as tuberculosis complicated by pregnancy.

The biographical shadow of her life — the early deaths of her siblings, the isolation of Haworth, the unrequited love, the governess experience — is closer to the surface in her work than in most novelists, and the biographical reading is useful but not sufficient. The formal achievement of Jane Eyre is real and independent of its source: the first-person voice that insists on its own authority, the Gothic plot that turns on a hidden marriage, the ending that refuses to be either purely tragic or conventionally happy. These are technical choices, not autobiographical accidents.