Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was born on 21 April 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the third of six children of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. After her mother’s death in 1821 and the family’s move to the parsonage at Haworth, the four surviving Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — turned inward, creating the elaborate imaginary worlds that nurtured their literary gifts.

Life and Career

Charlotte was the most worldly of the sisters. She attended the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge (the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre, where the harsh conditions contributed to the deaths of her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth), Margaret Wooler’s school at Roe Head, and the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels — where she fell painfully and hopelessly in love with her married teacher, Constantin Héger, an experience that pervades Villette and The Professor.

Her attempts to establish a school at Haworth failed, and she resigned herself to a life of writing. In 1845 she discovered Emily’s private notebook of poems and pressed her sisters to publish: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) appeared to near-total silence. The sisters then each wrote a novel: Charlotte’s The Professor was rejected by multiple publishers, but one editor, Smith, Elder & Company, expressed interest in seeing a longer work. Charlotte had already begun Jane Eyre, which she completed rapidly and published in October 1847 to immediate acclaim.

“Reader, I married him” — Jane Eyre’s famous declaration — announced a new voice in English fiction: fiercely independent, passionately emotional, and unapologetically female. The novel was a sensation. Within a year, Emily had died of tuberculosis (December 1848), Anne had died of the same disease (May 1849), and Branwell had preceded them both (September 1848). Charlotte was the sole surviving sibling.

She published Shirley (1849), a novel set against the Luddite uprisings, and Villette (1853), a masterpiece of psychological intensity based on her Brussels experience. In 1854 she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, after initial reluctance. She became pregnant and died on 31 March 1855, probably of hyperemesis gravidarum (severe morning sickness) combined with dehydration. She was thirty-eight.

Major Works and Themes

Charlotte’s fiction is driven by the tension between duty and desire, between the constraints imposed on women by Victorian society and the passionate inner life that refuses to be contained. Her heroines — Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe — are plain, poor, and obscure, but they possess an intensity of feeling and a moral strength that makes them the equal of anyone.

Jane Eyre (1847) is the essential Charlotte Brontë: the orphan’s journey from Lowood School through her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, her love for Mr. Rochester, the revelation of the madwoman in the attic (Bertha Mason), her flight, and her eventual return on her own terms. The novel’s insistence that a woman has the right to feel, to desire, and to choose was revolutionary.

Villette (1853) is Charlotte’s most complex and disturbing novel: Lucy Snowe’s narrative of her time teaching in a Brussels pensionnat is shot through with suppression, loneliness, and a psychological intensity that anticipates modernism. Many readers consider it her masterpiece.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Charlotte was the most famous of the Brontës during her lifetime and has remained so. Jane Eyre has never been out of print and has been adapted for stage, film, and television dozens of times. Feminist criticism has illuminated the novel’s radical assertion of female autonomy; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) used it as the foundational text for a new feminist literary criticism.

Key Works

• Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846)
• Jane Eyre (1847)
• Shirley (1849)
• Villette (1853)
• The Professor (1857, posthumous)

Collecting Brontë

Charlotte Brontë first editions are among the most valuable Victorian novels.

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847, Smith, Elder & Co., London, three volumes) is the primary collectible. Published under the pseudonym Currer Bell, the first edition in the original plum cloth is a major rarity. Complete three-volume sets in good condition bring $30,000–$100,000 at auction. The binding is a claret or plum-coloured cloth with blind-stamped decoration; condition of the cloth and the state of the hinges are key factors.

Villette (1853, Smith, Elder, three volumes) first editions bring $5,000–$20,000.

Shirley (1849, Smith, Elder, three volumes) is available at $3,000–$10,000.

The joint Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846, Aylott and Jones) is shared with Emily Brontë’s entry — see the Emily Brontë collecting section for details.

The Professor (1857, Smith, Elder, two volumes), published posthumously, first editions bring $2,000–$8,000.

Charlotte Brontë autograph material is scarce but not as rare as Emily’s. Her letters — particularly the anguished letters to Constantin Héger, which he tore up and which his family later reassembled and donated to the British Library — are of extraordinary literary and biographical value. Letters to her publisher George Smith and to her friend Ellen Nussey surface occasionally; prices range from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on content.