I Love Charlotte Bronté

Charlotte was an extraordinary literary talent and a woman whose vivid imagination and sheer determination allowed her to defy Victorian convention. However, she was also arguably a wild fantasist who lived a dangerous double life, obsessively intent on destroying the marriage of the man she fell in lust with and a hopeless romantic who was taken to the very edge of a nervous breakdown.

Those seeds of destruction were sown during her childhood in Haworth parsonage. Her lips were too small. Her head was far too big for her thin body. As for her hair, when curled it looked dry and frizzy, when left to its own devices it sat limply around her bony shoulders.

From the earliest age, it helped to draw Charlotte into imaginary worlds where those who loved passionately almost always triumphed. Most of those who found themselves invited into the Haworth parsonage with its bare sandstone floors and grey painted walls would have found little to hold their interest for long. It was to all but the most careful observer the kind of existence where each day was the same as the next and where life brought few surprises.

When formal lessons were over however, Charlotte, her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, and brother, Branwell, reached for one of the many books which lined the shelves on either side of the dining room fireplace. Almost immediately their otherwise grey world was transformed. It was perhaps little wonder Charlotte craved a world of exciting possibilities where happy endings could be delivered at a stroke of a pen and where old enemies could be dispatched with similar efficiency. Satisfaction at the achievement of their lifelong literary dreams was short-lived.

After her first London trip, Branwell passed away. Emily caught a cold at the funeral. Within months she too was dead. Then, unimaginably, Anne developed a persistent cough. Within eight months of her brother's death, Anne Bronte died of consumption. At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room - we used to talk.

Now I sit by myself - necessarily I am silent," wrote Charlotte, who would tell her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell that she would continue alone the pacing around the dining room the sisters had engaged in every night.

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Her career, she told a friend, was the only thing sustaining her. She was then working on her second published novel, Shirley, an industrial novel which did not earn her quite the rave reviews of Jane Eyre. Charlotte's earliest impressions of her future husband Arthur Bell Nicholls were that he was "good - mild and uncontentious. Her father was enraged at his temerity, and Nicholls instantly resigned. She seems to have eventually married him in rather a detached state of mind, - she signed a pre-nup agreement which in the event of her death protected her assets in her father's favour - but it's obvious a deep affection developed quickly, possibly starting with their honeymoon in Ireland.

The pre-nup was a legality that she was to later overturn when she realised she was terminally ill, saying to her husband shortly before she died, "Oh! I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy. Her husband went on to look after her father, until his death at the age of eighty-four, a sign of the devotion the shy, plain but wildly talented Charlotte had inspired.

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Your Christmas season streaming schedule sorted - what's new to Netflix in December Where are all the great Christmas songs? The true horrors of the festive season. Her first novel The Professor was rejected by publishers, her second novel Jane Eyre was published in The sisters admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in , and by the following year were celebrated in London literary circles. She became pregnant shortly after her marriage in June but died on 31 March of tuberculosis or possibly typhus. In her family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth , where her father had been appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church.

Maria died of cancer on 15 September , leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily and Anne , and a son, Branwell , to be taken care of by her sister, Elizabeth Branwell. Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development, and hastened the deaths of Maria born and Elizabeth born , who both died of tuberculosis in June After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school. Charlotte and Branwell wrote Byronic stories about their jointly imagined country, Angria, and Emily and Anne wrote articles and poems about Gondal.

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The sagas they created were episodic and elaborate, and they exist in incomplete manuscripts, some of which have been published as juvenilia. They provided them with an obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence, which prepared them for literary vocations in adulthood. Around about , her stories shifted from tales of the supernatural to more realistic stories. In she took up the first of many positions as governess to families in Yorkshire , a career she pursued until In particular, from May to July she was employed by the Sidgwick family at their summer residence, Stone Gappe , in Lothersdale, where one of her charges was John Benson Sidgwick — , an unruly child who on one occasion threw a Bible at Charlotte, an incident that may have been the inspiration for a part of the opening chapter of Jane Eyre in which John Reed throws a book at the young Jane.

Their time at the school was cut short when their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had joined the family in Haworth to look after the children after their mother's death, died of internal obstruction in October Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January to take up a teaching post at the school.

Her second stay was not happy: She returned to Haworth in January and used the time spent in Brussels as the inspiration for some of the events in The Professor and Villette. In May Charlotte, Emily, and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poems under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The pseudonyms veiled the sisters' sex while preserving their initials; thus Charlotte was Currer Bell. Although only two copies of the collection of poems were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their noms de plume when sending manuscripts to potential publishers.

Six weeks later, Jane Eyre was published. It tells the story of a plain governess, Jane, who, after difficulties in her early life, falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester. They marry, but only after Rochester's insane first wife, of whom Jane initially has no knowledge, dies in a dramatic house fire.

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The book's style was innovative, combining naturalism with gothic melodrama , and broke new ground in being written from an intensely evoked first-person female perspective. Jane Eyre had immediate commercial success and initially received favourable reviews. Lewes wrote that it was "an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit", and declared that it consisted of " suspiria de profundis!



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Branwell may have had a laudanum addiction. Emily became seriously ill shortly after his funeral and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December