Who is charlotte bronte

Charlotte began writing poetry as early as the age of thirteen and would continue to do so throughout her life.

Charlotte and her younger brother Branwell wrote stories about a fictional country called Angria, whilst Emily and Anne wrote poems and articles. From the age of fifteen, Charlotte attended Roe Head School to finish her education. She would soon return to the school for a period of three years to work as a teacher.

Both her poems and novels would consistently touch on her own life experience. By she had ceased teaching at the school and had taken a position as a governess, a career she would maintain for the next two years. In the opening scene, a young Jane is subjected to a book throwing incident by the obstinate young boy John Reed, a depiction of just some of the poor behaviour Jane would receive throughout the novel. Charlotte meanwhile, in worked for the Sidgwick family in Lothersdale.

There her task was to educate a young John Benson Sidgwick, a rather disobedient and uncontrollable child who hurled a Bible at Charlotte in a fit of temper.

During their stay, Emily taught music and Charlotte gave tuition in English, in exchange for board. Unfortunately, their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had looked after them after their mother had passed away, died in , forcing them to return home. I turned to Elizabeth Gaskell's Life, but I could not recognise the sanitised Charlotte she conjured up. Gaskell befriended Charlotte when the novelist was 34 and already a star. Contemporary critics had been appalled by Jane Eyre's "coarseness", but the public was thrilled and Charlotte was a celebrity.

Gaskell waspishly described her first sight of Charlotte in a letter: "She is underdeveloped, thin and more than half a head shorter than I Gaskell described her encounters with Charlotte to friends in long, gossipy, gawking letters. Why may I not be well like other people? She wanted to rescue her friend from the accusations of "coarseness" and she did not have to wait long: Charlotte died in , nine months after her wedding to Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Gaskell portrays Charlotte as Victim Supreme. Charlotte, Anne and Emily were "shy of meeting even familiar faces".

They "never faced their kind voluntarily". Under Gaskell's pen, they become the three witches of Haworth and she hurls on the Gothic gloom, ravaging the moorlands and the town for appropriate props.

She has a particular fondness for the graveyard outside their front door: "It is," she notes, "terribly full of upright tombstones. She could never accept they were, quite simply, talented. There had to be a magical mystery at work on those moors Gaskell carefully fillets the letters to match her agenda. Any hint of Charlotte as a sexual being is tossed on to the historical furnace.

Charlotte's correspondence with the married love of her life, Monsieur Heger of Brussels, is ignored, as is her thwarted romance with George Smith. Gaskell could hardly leave out Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Nicholls - but no doubt she would have liked to. Gaskell wrote the Life as a tragedy, not a triumph. She was not a wallflower in mourning. She always wanted to be famous; she pined to be "forever known".

Aged 20, she wrote boldly to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her talents. He replied: "You evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls 'the faculty of verse'.

The daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be. She concluded the correspondence "made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise".

Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach. As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: "I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?

After a trip home to Haworth, Charlotte returned alone to Brussels, where she remained until Upon her return home the sisters embarked upon their project for founding a school, which proved to be an abject failure: their advertisements did not elicit a single response from the public.

The following year Charlotte discovered Emily's poems, and decided to publish a selection of the poems of all three sisters: brought the publication of their Poems, written under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Charlotte also completed The Professor, which was rejected for publication. In Charlotte and Ann visited their publishers in London, and revealed the true identities of the "Bells.

Ann died the following year. In Charlotte, visiting London, began to move in literary circles, making the acquaintance, for example, of Thackeray.

In Charlotte edited her sister's various works, and met Mrs. In she visited the Great Exhibition in London, and attended a series of lectures given by Thackeray.