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About Charlotte Brontë

A tremendous critical and popular success when it was published in 1847, "Jane Eyre" has remained one of the most highly regarded and beloved novels in the English language. In an article published just two months after Charlotte Brontë's death, the prolific English novelist and journalist Mrs. Oliphant assessed the impact of the little governess who had so shocked the established authorities when "Jane Eyre" exploded on the scene. "Here is your true revolution. France is but one of the Western Powers; woman is the half of the world."

Here indeed was something new in literature: a woman of spirit who dared to turn on her master with this now famous assertion of her own integrity: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? -- You think wrong! -- I have as much soul as you -- and full as much heart!" For Rebecca West, Brontë was a "supreme artist" who told the truth about what "the whole civilization round her" preferred to keep hidden, and this did not sit well with Victorian England, which -- as West put it -- was "a man's country." "Jane Eyre" is a landmark because its heroine fearlessly gives voice to what Joyce Carol Oates has described as a "unique and iconoclastic female rebelliousness." And it is a thrilling read. Virginia Woolf stated the case simply and well: "It is not possible, when you are reading Charlotte Brontë, to lift your eyes from the page."

In 1836, 20-year-old Charlotte Brontë was a teacher at Roe Head School, a small academy just 18 miles from her home at Haworth in Yorkshire, England, where she herself had once been a student. Homesick, bored and exasperated with her students and oppressed by a terrible sense of futility, she poured her frustrations into her journal: "Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society, what in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought, dim now and indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade." Roe Head was "a continual waking Nightmare," but she knew the way out: "I'm just going to write because I cannot help it." A passionate yearning for the "unseen land of thought" may have seemed eccentric at Roe Head; but at home, at Haworth Parsonage, imagination, fantasy and intense creativity held absolute sway -- for, as one of Brontë's biographers, Winifred Gerin, has written, Charlotte Brontë and her remarkable siblings are that miraculous thing: "a rare, almost unique example ... of collective genius."

Charlotte Brontë was born at Thornton in Yorkshire on April 21, 1816, the third daughter of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, a native of County Down in Ireland, and Maria Branwell, who came from Penzance, Cornwall, a seaport in extreme southwestern England. In 1820, the Brontë family (by then there were six children) moved to Haworth, an isolated village surrounded by the Yorkshire moors. Crusty, droll, hard-driven and hard-working, Patrick Brontë would serve as perpetual curate (now usually styled "vicar") of this moorland parish until his death in 1861. When Maria Brontë died in 1821, Charlotte and her sisters -- Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Anne -- and her brother Branwell were raised by their aunt Elizabeth Branwell.

In 1824, the four eldest daughters were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, a grim and ill-run charitable institution, which Charlotte would later portray, unforgettably, as Lowood in "Jane Eyre." After Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis the following year, Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from Cowan Bridge. For the next six years, the surviving children were educated at home by their father. They became each other's constant companions, sharing a rich imaginative life that was fired by their voracious reading. Their "highest stimulus ... lay in attempts at literary composition," and the Parsonage was indeed overrun by what Charlotte accurately called "scriblemania." They wrote stories, poems and plays that chronicled the exploits of the heroes and heroines of their intensely imagined fantasy worlds. And they produced scores of the hand-stitched, minutely lettered, almost unbelievably microscopic magazines that many years later so startled Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's great friend and biographer. "They gave one," she would gravely note, "the idea of creative power carried to the verge of insanity."

For a brief period in 1839, and then again for nine months in 1841, Charlotte worked as a governess, an occupation that made her intensely miserable. In February 1842, she and Emily entered the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, for they hoped one day to open their own school and wanted to improve their skills in French and German. But they were recalled to Haworth in early November by Aunt Branwell's death. Charlotte returned alone to Brussels early the next year to both study and teach at the Pensionnat. Her growing love for Monsieur Heger, the kind and cultivated husband of the school's directress, caused her great torment. She later portrayed him as Paul Emmanuel in "Villette" (1853), a book the great Victorian novelist George Eliot would later describe as "almost preternatural in its power." She returned to Haworth early in 1844, and later that year plans for the sisters' school collapsed. They had received not one response to a prospectus that announced "The Misses Brontë's Establishment for the Board and Education of a Limited Number of Young Ladies" (at Ł35 per annum).

In 1845, Charlotte "accidentally lighted" on a manuscript book of Emily's poems, and was stunned by what she found there: "peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating." The next year, the sisters "committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems." Paid for by the Brontës themselves and published under masculine pseudonyms because the sisters wanted to be judged as writers, not as "authoresses," "Poems" by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell received a few warm notices, but it sold poorly. As Charlotte wryly informed Thomas De Quincey, one of the notables to whom she sent a complimentary copy of the little volume: "Our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two -- himself only knows."

The sisters were undeterred, for "the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence." Each immediately set to work on a prose tale. Emily's "Wuthering Heights" and Anne's "Agnes Grey" were eventually accepted for publication, but Charlotte's first novel, "The Professor," was rejected six times. By August 1846, Charlotte was writing "Jane Eyre," and within a year it was snapped up by one of the publishers who had turned down "The Professor."

Published on October 16, 1847, "Jane Eyre" -- purportedly an "autobiography" edited by one "Currer Bell" -- caused a sensation in literary London. Thackeray proclaimed it "the master-work of a great genius" and Fraser's Magazine hailed it as "an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit." Even critics who were shocked by "Jane Eyre" acknowledged its force. Elizabeth Rigby, whose assault on the novel and its author in the Quarterly Review (December 1848) is so vituperative as to now seem almost unhinged, grudgingly admitted the point: "It is a very remarkable book: we have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid style."

Who was Currer Bell? What "great genius" had written this audacious and passionate novel that seemed to have come out of the blue? No one, not even its publisher, George Smith, had any idea; and the mystery led to much wild speculation about the fiery soul who had written a novel of such force and originality.

Her brother, Branwell, whose wild behavior and alcoholism had completely alienated Charlotte, died in September 1848. By December, Emily was dead of tuberculosis (her health had declined rapidly after she caught a cold at her brother's funeral); and less than six months later Anne, too, had succumbed to that disease. Throughout this terrible period, Charlotte somehow managed to continue writing, her third novel, Shirley, appearing in 1849.

By the time "Villette" was published in 1853, Currer Bell's actual identity was well known. Her great success brought Brontë the admiration and friendship of many of the illustrious literary and social lions of mid-Victorian England, including Elizabeth Gaskell and William Makepeace Thackeray, two of the most celebrated novelists of the day. She was now famous, and yet contemporaries were often struck by Brontë's unprepossessing appearance. A young writer who was invited to the Parsonage for dinner in 1850 left a memorable portrait of his hostess:

She was diminutive in height, and extremely fragile in figure. Her hand was one of the smallest I have ever grasped. She had no pretensions to being considered beautiful, and was as far removed from being plain. She had rather light brown hair, somewhat thin, and drawn plainly over her brow. Her complexion had no trace of colour in it, and her lips were pallid also; but she had a most sweet smile, with a touch of tender melancholy in it. Altogether she was as unpretending, undemonstrative, quiet a little lady as you could well meet.

In June 1854, after much hesitation on her part, Brontë married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a kind but "not intellectual" man who was a curate under her father. That September, she wrote her oldest friend, Ellen Nussey: "Indeed -- indeed Nell -- it is a solemn and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot is far -- far different." The marriage did in fact bring her a measure of happiness, but, tragically, Charlotte Brontë died on March 31, 1855, most probably from complications arising from pregnancy. Harriet Martineau -- then quite famous as a novelist and political writer -- remembered a tiny woman whose "eyes blazed." She wrote: "We have three works from her pen which will hold their place in the literature of our country ... there might have been three times three -- for she was under forty -- and her genius was not of an exhaustible kind."

Excerpted from Jane Eyre, New York Public Library Collectors Edition. "About Charlotte Brontë" Š copyright 1997 by the New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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