Brontë, CHARLOTTE, one of the most gifted English novelists, was born at Thornton, in Yorkshire, on the 21st April 1816. Her father, originally Patrick Prunty (1777-1861), who was a clergyman, belonged to Ireland; her mother was a native of Cornwall. Her life almost to its close was one of sorrow and struggle. In 1821 the family removed to the parsonage of Haworth, a village situated amid the Yorkshire moors, and in the following year Charlotte's mother died. In her eighth year she was sent to Cowan's Bridge School, the Lowood of which she has given so dark a picture in Jane Eyre. After the deaths of two of her sisters at Cowan's Bridge, Charlotte, whose health had broken down, was taken back to Haworth, and remained there until 1831, when she was sent to a school at Roehead kept by Miss Wooler, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Mr Brontë's austere and gloomy nature cast a shadow over his children's lives. His means were narrow, and his daughters, Charlotte, Emily (born 1818), and Anne (born 1820), were forced to seek a livelihood as governesses. To fit themselves for higher educational work, Charlotte and Emily studied at Brussels, where they lived in a pension from 1842 to 1844. In 1846 the three sisters published a volume of poems bearing on its title-page the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—Currer Bell being the pseudonym of Charlotte. The book attracted little notice. Its authors then turned to prose fiction; Charlotte writing The Professor; Anne, Agnes Grey; and Emily ('Ellis Bell'), the strange, moving romance of Wuthering Heights. The Professor having been rejected on the score of deficiency in plot-interest, Charlotte set to work upon Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847, and gained a great but not an uncontested success. Her sister Emily and her brother Branwell died in 1848, and after the death of Anne, in the following year, Charlotte was left alone with her father in the gloomy Haworth parsonage. A third novel, Shirley, appeared in 1849, and in 1852 Villette, which was her own favourite book, and which contains in Paul Emmanuel the best character she ever drew, was given to the world. She was married in 1854 to Mr Nicholls, who had been her father's curate at Haworth. Her brief married life was a happy one, though her husband had no sympathy with her in her literary work, which, indeed, he would have preferred her to abandon. A new story, Emma, had been begun, however, before her death, which occurred on March 31, 1855. Her life and writings are very closely connected. She is herself the heroine of Jane Eyre and of Villette, while Shirley was intended for the portrait of her sister Emily. Her range was not wide, but in imaginative strength her stories rank with the greatest in literature. Her peculiar power lies in delineating and in suggesting intense passion without having recourse to unusual or exciting situations. Except in part of Jane Eyre, where she endeavoured, against the bent of her genius, to construct a sensational plot, her scenes and incidents are those of uneventful, everyday life. Her style, though unequally sustained, is at its best admirably terse and vivid. Emily Brontë revealed in Wuthering Heights a genius in some ways higher and finer, though far less mature than Charlotte's. The story is as wild as a dream; but the strange, passionate figures are the creations of a daring and fiery imagination, and the beautiful descriptions of moorland scenery have hardly been surpassed in fiction.
See The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Mrs Gaskell (1857); A Note on Charlotte Brontë, by A. C. Swinburne (1877); Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph, by Sir W. Reid (1877); Miss Robinson's study on Emily (1883), and Augustine Birrell's on Charlotte (1887); Dr W. Wright, The Brontës in Ireland (1893; 2d ed. 1896); the Bibliography published by the Brontë Society (1894); Clement K. Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (1896).