Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte who was born in 1816, was the eldest of 3 sisters who lived in their father's parsonage at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Their home's remoteness and their lack of any companionship outside the family, as Charlotte said, to be ' wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study for the enjoyments and occupational of life.' And amongst their activities ' the highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we knew from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition. In 1845 they managed, with great difficulty, to publish a volume of their poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Each of them then set to work on novels, Charlotte (Currer) writing 'The Professor' and 'Jane Eyre', Anne (Acton) 'Agnes Gray', and Emily (Ellis) 'Wuthering Heights'.
'Jane Eyre' was the first to appear in print- in 1847 the year, also, of Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' and Disraeli's 'Tancred'. It quickly became one of the most talked about novels of the day, while 'Wuthering Heights' which also followed later in the same year, was for a long time regarded as an earlier and cruder attempt by the same author. Emily and Anne Bronte died soon afterwards, but Charlotte wrote 2 more novels, 'Shirley' in1849 and 'Vilette', a re- handling of the material used in 'The Professor', in1853. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Rev. A.B. Nicolls, but died a few months later.