In her imagination, and in the way she valued the product of her imagination, she was fearless - so fearless that she eventually paid to have a volume of poems by her and her younger sisters published under pseudonyms, an unusually ambitious act for a woman of her era.

Yet in her elaborate imaginary life, one she created with her siblings, in plays and stories and with maps, she could imagine herself as bold and swashbuckling, a magician or soldier or politician - her personal hero was the Duke of Wellington. It was a will that would ultimately produce some of the most revolutionary novels of the 19th century.Ĭharlotte Brontë, born April 21, 1816, was one of six siblings whose mother died when they were all still small her father, Patrick Brontë, a brilliant clergyman on a modest salary, brought the children up in Haworth, England, by the desolate moors of Yorkshire, in a stone house surrounded by a graveyard on all sides but one, Gaskell wrote.Īs a child, and even as an adult, Brontë was small and frail, so shy among strangers that one host recalled her twisting herself around in her chair so that she could converse without making eye contact. Coleridge offered no great praise, but even his unbiased diffidence failed to sap Brontë’s will to write, to publish, to be, in a sense, heard. When she later decided to send a sample of her work to the poet Hartley Coleridge, she made no mention of her gender. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” he wrote, “and it ought not to be.”īrontë wrote back conceding the wisdom of his advice, then devoted much of her life to ignoring it.

In his reply, Southey acknowledged that Brontë showed talent, but he nonetheless discouraged her from pursuing her craft, and warned her off ambition itself.

Although her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell would eventually write of Brontë’s “constitutional absence of hope,” the young teacher clearly already had a firm sense of her own worth - an enterprising spirit and ambition, and a longing for her own genius to find its way into the world. Charlotte Brontë was a 20-year-old schoolteacher - impatient, dreamy, long-suffering, unpublished - when, in 1836, she sent a sample of her writing to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate at the time.

Jane eyre sisters