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Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England in 1816. She spent most of her life at Haworth, a town on the Yorkshire moors, though for a short time she studied languages in Brussels. She grew up with four sisters (Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Anne) and one brother, Branwell. Her life was marked by disease and premature death: her mother died when she was five, and her two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth died two years later in 1824. Together with Emily and Charlotte, they had been sent to a school for daughters of the clergy, and Charlotte connected their deaths with the ill-management of the school. This school was later to be fictionalised in the Lowood section of her most famous work, Jane Eyre (1847).

Jane Eyre was written under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, and was her second novel, though her first to be published. She had previously written The Professor, a lesser known work published posthumously in 1857. Brontë’s other works are Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853).

Brontë is said to have been inspired to write by a passion to make Victorian attitudes towards women more visible. She was advised by one critic to study Jane Austen’s novels, which she did, though she thought Austen was not a true novelist, and concluded her work to be of no use to her. With her sister Emily, Charlotte wanted to create a prose style that incorporated a poetic method. She wanted this new technique to convey the true and tragic experience of women, and a sense of life’s inner workings. Her efforts with prose technique led to the novel becoming the major art form of the nineteenth century.

The main themes in Brontë’s works are uncovering assumptions about women, the conventions of social life and gender relations. Her works are concerned with the fulfilling of desires relating to both passion and ambition. Her novels are favoured by feminist criticism, and to a lesser extent postcolonial criticism, particularly after the publication of Jean RhysWide Sargasso Sea, where Rhys writes a fictional life of Bertha, the Creole woman kept in Rochester’s attic in Jane Eyre.

Brontë was known by William Thackeray, who described Jane Eyre in a review as “the masterwork of a great genius”. Jane Eyre was instantly popular, and readers warmed to the character of Jane, an orphan, who searches for her place in the world. Villette also centres on a female character, with the main setting being life in a girls’ boarding school. This novel is noted for its psychological complexity and skilful use of language and imagery.

Charlotte Brontë married in 1854, and died the following year.

 

 

Simon and Delyse Ryan ACU National