English novelist and poet, the eldest of the Brontë sisters, she wrote (1847) under the pen name of Currer Bell: she was persuaded to reveal her identity by her publisher once the novel enjoyed huge, unexpected success sparking a movement in regards to feminism in literature. SECTION SUMMARY

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CHARLOTTE BRONTË  1816: born in Thornton, Yorkshire, she was the third of six children. Her father was an Irish Anglican clergyman, vicar at St. Peter’ s Church at Harts- head. She would eventually base her novel on the area.  1820: the family moved a few miles to Haworth in the care of Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt, after Mrs. Brontë’s death(1821).  1824: Charlotte was sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School. Its poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and hastened the deaths of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died of tuberculosis in June 1825. Their father removed both Charlotte and Emily from the school . 4 CHARLOTTE BRONTË At home she and the other surviving children (Branwell, talented but weak; Emily, who would become famous for ; Anne, author of the novel ) began writing elaborate sagas on the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms.  1831-32: Charlotte continued her education at Roe Head, returning there as a teacher in 1835.  1839-41: she took up the first of many positions as governess to various families in Yorkshire but the sisters planned to open a school together, which their aunt agreed to finance.  1842: Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as pupils to improve their qualifications in French and acquire some German. 5 CHARLOTTE BRONTË

The talent displayed by the two sisters brought them to the notice of Constantin Héger, a fine teacher and a man of unusual perception: his strong and eccentric personality appealed both to her sense of humour and to her affections. She offered him an innocent but ardent devotion and became aware of her own great literary resources.

 1844: Charlotte attempted to start the school that she had long envisaged. Prospectuses were issued, but no pupils were attracted to distant Haworth… 6 CHARLOTTE BRONTË  1846: together Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published a collection of poems under the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold but the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels.

 1847: she published Jane Eyre. It was an immediate success! In the years which followed Branwell and Emily (1848) as well as Anne (1849) died: Charlotte was left alone with her aging father.

 1848: attempting to cope with her grief she resumed writing and her second novel, Shirley, was published in 1849. 7 CHARLOTTE BRONTË  1853: her third novel, , took inspiration from her own experiences at the boarding school in Brussels.  1854: she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. The marriage was a very happy one and she became pregnant soon after but her health declined rapidly.  1855: she died, along with her unborn child, at the age of 38, and was buried in the family vault in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels at Haworth. Her novel , written before Jane Eyre, was published posthumously in 1857. 8

JANE EYRE (1847)

 Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character which goes through five distinct stages: 1. Jane’s childhood at Gateshead, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; 2. her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; 3. her time as the governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; 4.a period at Moor House with the Rivers family during which her earnest but cold clergyman-cousin St John Rivers acts as a spiritual guide, proposes to her and suggests a missionary life;

5. her reunion with and marriage to her beloved Rochester. 10 THREE GENRES  The novel merges three distinct genres: ❑ it has the form of a Bildungsroman, a story about a child’s maturation, focusing on the emotions and experiences that accompany growth to adulthood; ❑ it also contains much social criticism, with a strong sense of morality at its core; ❑ it has the brooding, moody quality and a mystery character typical of Gothic fiction.  It is considered a proto-feminist novel which portrays the evolution of a thinking, individualistic, passionate young woman, who desires a full life but is also highly moral and capable of making difficult choices. 11

RELIGION…  God and religion are foremost in the novel: Jane, an unconventional heroine, independent and self-reliant, ❑ encounters different models of religion which she ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences; ❑ endeavours to attain a balance between moral duty and earthly happiness honouring traditional morality and achieving a full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.

 In her, religion acts to moderate her behaviour, not to repress her true self: her happiness will be complete

only when atonement and forgiveness are attained. 13 … & LOVE.  Love and passion are pivotal themes: a life that is not lived passionately is not lived fully. ❑ Real love (Jane + Rochester) will be rewarded. ❑ False loves (Bertha + Rochester, Blanche Ingram + Rochester, St. John Rivers + Jane) will simply not make it.

 The novel is a plea for the recognition of the individual’s worth: Jane demands to be treated as an independent human being, a person with

her own needs and talents. 14 EQUALITY…  Women and men should enjoy equal rights and be given equal opportunities: this is what Jane/Charlotte believes.

“… Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties… they suffer from too rigid a constraint precisely as men would suffer… It is thoughtless to condemn them,or laugh at them, if they seek to do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex…” (ch. 12)

15 … & FREEDOM.

… and when Jane, misinterpreting Rochester’s wedding plans, believes that she has to leave him for good she cries “… I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave and we stood at God’s feet, equal. – as we are!” and later “… I am a free human being with an independent will…” (ch. 23)

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LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT Jane Eyre had enormous success, so she was persuaded by her publisher to visit London and reveal her true identity: she began to move in more exalted social circles, becoming friends with writers like and W. M. Thackeray.  The novel sparked a movement in regards to feminism in literature: the main character was a parallel to her, a very strong woman and yet this is how Charlotte was described by Anne Thackaray, the writer’s daughter, the night she met her… “… a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, with fair straight hair, and steady eyes… Every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. Miss Brontë retired to the sofa in the study, and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess…

It was one of the dullest evenings… ever spent…” 18 A CURIOSITY.  She was so reserved that no authorial portrait was permitted to circulate in the press or accompany her work: although she herself penned a ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ in which she revealed the names behind the pseudonyms and performed the first public telling of her sisters’ lives, she preferred to “walk invisible” , as she put it in a letter to the literary editor W.S. Williams.  Nevertheless Charlotte too entered myth: after a first flurry of obituaries and memorials at her death, her story was told by Elizabeth Gaskell in what would become one of the 19th- century’s most famous biographies, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which

transformed its subject into an icon. 19 The BRONTËS: CREATORS of WORLDS…  In 1826, Patrick Brontë gave Branwell a treasured set of toy soldiers. The siblings named them the Twelves or “Young Men” and created names and personalities that brought them to life. They made up stories about a fictional “ Confederacy” that the soldiers ruled over.  From this developed two great fictional kingdoms of Gondal, run by Emily and Anne, and Angria, run by Charlotte and Branwell. The imaginary kingdoms that they invented were highly developed and detailed. They had histories, geographies, mythologies, wars and romances and feuds and alliances.  The children created a whole corpus of work around them, intended it seems, for their eyes only. 20 … in TINY LITTLE BOOKS!

 They wrote and performed plays with no audiences. They produced magazines with no readers. They made tiny little books (some the size of a matchbook!) with minuscule writing which required a magnifying glass to read.

 These endeavours happily absorbed their time. Think how many hours of quiet concentration it would have taken to execute such tiny writing with quill pens!

 Many of the elaborate sagas have been lost, although some of the little manuscripts and books still exist. These precious works provide us with a glimpse into their secretive childhood world. 21 A SPECIAL LEGACY  Notwithstanding Charlotte’s legacy as a writer and as a woman, the Brontë family also claims a very special heritage: the Brontë Society, one of the oldest literary societies in the world.  Founded in 1893, it is responsible for running the Brontë Parsonage Museum in the picturesque village of Haworth in West Yorkshire, once the home of the family, and also for promoting the Brontës’ literary legacy within contemporary society.  It has been particularly active in this last decade celebrating the bicentenaries of Charlotte Brontë in 2016, Branwell Brontë

in 2017, Emily Brontë in 2018 and Anne Brontë in 2020. 22