Charlotte Bronte’s mother was Maria Branwell Bronte; altogether she had six children including charlotte. Mrs. Bronte was awarded a rectorship in Yorkshire 1820. Soon after, Mrs. Bronte and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Also a boy, Patrick Branwell. An aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, aided their upbringing. She left her native Cornwall and took up residence with the family at Haworth.
In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters attended Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh. They did not like it one bit. Charlotte always complained and made a fuss.
Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than five years the Bronte children learned and played there, writing and telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate moors.
In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, near Huddersfield, where she stayed a year and made some lasting friendships.
In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Rev. Henry Nussey, her friend's brother, and some months later one from another young clergyman. At the same time Charlotte's ambition to make the practical best of her talents and the need to pay Branwell's debts urged her to spend some months as governess with the Whites at Upper wood House, Rawdon. Branwell's talents for writing and painting, his good classical scholarship, and his social charm had engendered high hopes for him; but he was fundamentally unstable, weak willed, and intemperate. He went from job to job and took refuge in alcohol and opium.
Meanwhile Charlotte had planned to open a school with her sister emily. Her aunt had agreed to finance, and in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as pupils to improve their qualifications in French and acquire some German. The talent displayed by both brought them to the notice of Constantin Héger, a fine teacher and a man of unusual perception. After a brief trip home upon the death of her aunt, Charlotte returned to Brussels as a pupil-teacher. She stayed there during 1843 but was lonely and depressed
Meanwhile, in 1851, she had declined a third offer of marriage, this time from James Taylor, and a member of Smith, Elder and Company. Her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817-1906), an Irishman, was her fourth suitor. It took some months to win her father's consent, but they were married on June 29, 1854, in Haworth church. They spent their honeymoon in Ireland and then returned to Haworth, where her husband had pledged himself to continue as curate to her father. He did not share his wife's intellectual life, but she was happy to be loved for herself and to take up her duties as his wife. She began another book, Emma, of which some pages remain. Her pregnancy, however, was accompanied by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855.
She died March 31, 1855 in Haworth, Yorkshire.
Step 3
In the Victorian society women were seen as nothing they were mens property. Women satayed at home and did housework while their husbands went out to the work as the breadwinner of the house. Women didn’t have the chance to speak out. Also in the Victorian times the rich and the poor were never seen with each other. Poor people were seen as low life people who were tramps. Love above classes was really an issue to many families. Some families didn’t like their daughters/sons to marry someone who was poor/ lower than them. This caused a problem, which meant that not a lot of poor people were needed.
Step 4
Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the heroine's choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. But her hair's-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer, and the death by fire of his mad first wife derives from the rather different tradition of the Gothic novel.
English novelist, noted for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction.
