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http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cbronte.htm Charlotte Brontė (1816-1855) - pseudonym CURRER BELL English writer noted for her novel JANE EYRE (1847), sister of Anne Brontė and Emily Brontė. The three sisters are almost as famous for their short, tragic lives as for their novels. In their works they described love more truthfully that was common in Victorian age England. In the past 40 years Charlotte Brontė's reputation has risen rapidly, and feminist criticism has done much to show that she was speaking up for oppressed women of every age. "'And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Mater Reed, because missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and try to make yourself agreeable to them.'" (from Jane Eyre) 'A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid', is how George Lewes described Charlotte Brontė to George Eliot. She was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Charlotte was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who had moved with his family to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820. The landscape around the parsonage, the lonely rolling moors and wild wind, influences all the Brontė sisters deeply. After their mother and two eldest children died, Chalotte was left with her sisters Emily and Anne and brother Branwell to the care of their father, and their strict, religious aunt, Elisabeth Branwell. "All around the horizon the is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors - grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be." (Elizabet Gaskell in The Life of Charlotte Brontė, 1857) The Brontės were small, Emily was considered to be tall at that time, but Charlotte's dress preserved in the Brontė Parsonage Museum would perhaps fit nowadays a eleven-year old. At the upstairs of the parsonage, a small house, was two bedrooms and a third room, scarcely bigger than a closet, in which the sisters played their games. The front door opened almost directly on to the churchyard. To escape their unhappy surroundings, the children listened stories about the often violent behavior of the countryfolk. When other children enjoyed to play outdoors, they created imaginary kingdoms, which were built around Branwell's toy soldiers, and which inspired them to create continuing stories of fantasylands of Angria and Gondal. "We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air." Charlotte attended Clergy Daughter's School in Lancashire in 1824. She returned home next year because of the harsh conditions. In 1831 she went to school at Roe Head, where she later worked as a teacher. However, she fell ill, suffered from melancholia, and gave up this post. Charlotte's attempts to earn her living as a governess were hindered by her disabling shyness, her ignorance of normal children, and her yearning to be with her sisters. In 1842 Charlotte travelled to Brussels with Emily to learn French, German, and management. During this period she fell in love with a married man, M. Heger, the owner of the Pensionnat Heger, a girls' school, where Charlotte and Emily were pupils and Charlotte later taught. Her own attempt to open a school failed in 1844. The collection of poems, POEMS BY CURRER, ELLIS AND ACTON BELL (1846), which she wrote with her sisters. The surname was probably taken from Arthur Bell Nicholls, then their father's curate. "Oh! Love was all a thin illusion; / Joy, but the desert's flying stream," Charlotte wrote in one of its poems, perhaps referring her sad experiences in Brussels. The book sold only two copies, but the costs were £37; the sum could represent a year's wages. By the time of its publication her sisters had finished a novel; Charlotte's first, THE PROFESSOR, was based on her experiences of teaching in Brussels, never found a publisher in her lifetime. Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were accepted by Thomas Newby in 1847 and published next year. "Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last." (from the preface to Jane Eyre) Undeterred by her own rejection, Charlotte began Jane Eyre, which came out in October 1847, and became an immediate success. Charlotte dedicated the book to William Makepeace Thackeray, who described it as 'the masterwork of a great genius'. The heroine is a penniless orphan who becomes a teacher, obtains a post as a governess, inherits money from an uncle, and marries after several turns of the plot the Byronic hero, Rochester. Their first meeting is described in comical light - Rochester falls off a horse. The narrator asks "are you injured, sir," but do not get a reply: "I think he was swearing, but I am not certain; however, he was pronouncing some formula which prevented him from replying to me directly." Some readers of the novel suggested that its author was a depraved man. It was followed by SHIRLEY (1848) and VILLETTE (1853), based on her memories of Brussels. Although her identity was well known, Charlotte continued to publish as Currer Bell. Her tragedy, BELISAIOUS, is lost. In Jane Eyre used her experiences at the Evangelical school and as governess. The novel severely criticized the limited options open to educated but impoverished women, and the idea that women "ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags." Jane's passionate desire for a wider life, her need to be loved, and her rebellious questioning of conventions, also reflected Charlotte's own dreams. Jane is an "Ugly Duckling", who fulfills all the teenage romantic dreams of passion, that breaks all obstacles. The gloomy hero, Mr Rochester, represents the ideal of masculine tenderness, which is combined with masculine strength - all along Byronic lines. Jane's discovery at the altar that Rochester has an insane wife hidden in the attic is the most shocking plot twist of the novel. Some later critics have presented that the mad Bertha Rochester is a nymphomaniac.
Approximate Word count = 4196
Approximate Pages = 16.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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