Charlotte Brontë: The Survivor Who Wrote Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë is the sister history knows best – the author of Jane Eyre, the family's ambassador to the literary world, and, in the end, its sole survivor, left to walk the parsonage dining room alone after burying her brother and both sisters within eight months. Barely four foot ten, desperately short-sighted, convinced of her own plainness, she nonetheless carried a will that bent publishers, critics and eventually the whole reading world to her terms. "I am neither a man nor a woman," she once told her publisher, "I am an author." Here is Charlotte's extraordinary life – the indispensable backbone of any Brontë pilgrimage.

A childhood built of loss and ink

Born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton, third of the six Brontë children, Charlotte moved to Haworth Parsonage at four, lost her mother at five, and at eight was sent with three sisters to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge – where, within a year, tuberculosis killed her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. The experience branded her; twenty years later she prosecuted the school in fiction as Jane Eyre's Lowood, with dying Helen Burns her portrait of Maria. Home again, the four surviving children built their famous imaginary worlds from a box of toy soldiers: Charlotte and Branwell's kingdom of Angria filled hundreds of miniature hand-made books with melodrama, politics and passion – a twenty-year apprenticeship in fiction conducted in secret, in handwriting the size of print.

Governess years and the Brussels wound

As the family's realistic eldest, Charlotte trained at Roe Head school and returned there as a teacher, then endured governess posts she loathed – the powerless, invisible position she would avenge in Jane Eyre. In 1842 came the adventure that shaped her inner life: she and Emily travelled to Brussels to study French at the Pensionnat Heger, and Charlotte fell profoundly, hopelessly in love with the school's married proprietor-teacher, Constantin Heger – a brilliant, mercurial man who took her intellect seriously as no one outside Haworth ever had. Nothing improper occurred; everything emotionally decisive did. Her later letters to Heger – desperate, magnificent documents which his family preserved (torn up and sewn back together, a story in itself) and which are now in the British Library – record the wound; her novels Villette and The Professor transmute it into some of the century's most piercing psychological fiction. Explore the collections at bl.uk.

Currer Bell conquers London

Back at Haworth, Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems in 1845 triggered the sisters' joint pseudonymous collection (1846, two copies sold) and then the great gamble: three novels dispatched to publishers under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte's first, The Professor, was rejected everywhere – but one rejection came with encouragement, and in response she finished a new manuscript at speed. Jane Eyre appeared in October 1847 and detonated: a plain, poor governess-heroine who demanded equality in love ("I am a free human being with an independent will"), a gothic secret, and a voice of such directness that London could talk of little else. Thackeray sat up all night reading it. Speculation raged about the unknown "Currer Bell" – and in July 1848, to untangle a publishing dispute, Charlotte and Anne took the night train to London and presented themselves, two tiny provincial women in plain dress, at the offices of the astonished George Smith. The scene – "we are three sisters" – remains one of the best in literary history.

The annihilating year – and after

Triumph and catastrophe then arrived together. Between September 1848 and May 1849 Charlotte lost Branwell, Emily and Anne in succession, nursing each and finishing her second published novel, Shirley, in the silence they left. Fame offered a strange half-consolation: as her identity emerged she was lionised on visits to London, meeting Thackeray and her hero the Duke of Wellington's circle, sitting for the society portraitist George Richmond – and finding celebrity mostly an ordeal for a woman so shy that dinner parties struck her mute. In 1850, on a Lake District visit, she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who became a close friend – and, in time, her first and most influential biographer. Villette (1853), wrought from the Brussels experience, is judged by many critics her masterpiece: bleaker than Jane Eyre, and deeper.

Late love, early death

The last movement of Charlotte's life is quietly devastating. Her father's Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, had loved her silently for years; his 1852 proposal enraged old Patrick (who thought a poor curate no match for a famous authoress), and Charlotte, initially unmoved, refused him. Nicholls' stubborn, wretched constancy gradually won her respect, then affection; they married in Haworth church on 29 June 1854, and to her own surprise Charlotte found herself happy – "my dear boy," she called him. Within months she was pregnant, and suffering the violent, unrelenting sickness now recognised as hyperemesis gravidarum. She died on 31 March 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday, and was laid in the family vault in Haworth church beside Emily. Her father and her husband – who kept his promise to care for old Patrick until the parson's death in 1861 – survived her. Two years later, Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) fixed the family legend for all time. Her manuscripts, dresses, tiny shoes and writing desk are the emotional core of the Brontë Parsonage Museum; George Richmond's famous portrait of her hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Walking Charlotte's world

Charlotte is the most traceable Brontë: the parsonage rooms where she wrote and died; the church where she married and lies buried; Cowan Bridge, the original of Lowood, near the Lake District road; the Yorkshire and Derbyshire houses behind Thornfield; even the Lake District itself, where she holidayed and met Gaskell. Our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum six guests, including a Jane Eyre-themed day – put her biography and her masterpiece back into the landscape that produced them. She asked to be judged as an author, not a woman; visit her country, and you will judge her one of the greatest.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.