Charlotte Bronte was an English writer. She was born in 1816 at Thornton and died in 1855. She was the third daughter of the Reverend Patrick Bronte, rector of Thornton, from which he removed in 1820, on becoming incumbent of Haworth, a moorland village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, about four miles from Keighley. Her mother died soon after this removal, and her father, an able though eccentric man, brought up Charlotte and her sisters in quite a Spartan fashion, inuring them to every kind of industry and fatigue.
After an education received partly at home and partly at neighbouring schools, Charlotte Bronte became a teacher, and then a governess in a family. In 1842 she went with her sister Emily Bronte to Brussels, with the view of acquiring a knowledge of the French and German languages, and she subsequently taught for a year in the school she had attended here.
In 1844 arrangements were entered into by her and her sisters Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte to open a school at Haworth, but from the want of success in obtaining pupils no progress was ever made with their scheme. They resolved now to turn their attention to literary composition; and in 1846 a volume of poems by the three sisters was published, under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It was issued at their own risk, and attracted little attention, so they quit poetry for prose fiction, and produced each a novel. Charlotte Bronte (writing as Currer Bell) entitled her production The Professor, but it was everywhere refused by the publishing trade, and was not given to the world until after her death. Emily Bronte (writing as Ellis Bell) with her tale of Wuthering Heights, and Anne Bronte (writing as Acton Bell) with Agnes Grey, were more successful.
Charlotte Bronte's failure, however, did not discourage her, and she composed the novel of Jane Eyre, which was published in October, 1847. Its success was immediate and decided. Her second novel of Shirley appeared in 1849. Previous to this she had lost her two sisters, Emily dying on the 19th of December 1848, and Anne on the 28th of May, 1849 (after publishing a second novel, The Tenant of Wild Fell Hall). In the autumn of 1852 appeared Charlotte's third novel, Villette. Shortly after, she married her father's curate, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, but in nine months died of consumption. Her originally rejected tale of The Professor was published after her death, in 1857, and the same year a biography of her appeared written by Elizabeth Gaskell. Research Charlotte Bronte
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