Loss and suffering gave Charlotte Bronte’s writing an authentic voice

IT is 200 years after her birth, but Charlotte Bronte — the eldest Bronte sister to reach adulthood — is still remembered for her first novel Jane Eyre published in 1847.

“VILLETTE! Villette! Have you read it?” exclaimed author George Eliot when Charlotte Bronte’s final novel was published in 1853. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”

But 200 years after her birth, the eldest Bronte sister to reach adulthood is still remembered for her first novel Jane Eyre, credited to Curer Bell when published in 1847.

Like governess Jane Eyre, Bronte’s final protagonist Lucy Snowe was alone in the world, without family or fortune, when she arrived in cosmopolitan Villette to work as a teacher at a French boarding school.

Given Bronte’s conviction that art was most convincing when drawn from personal experience, it is unsurprising Jane Eyre and Villette won popular and critical acclaim.

Born on April 21, 1816, at Thornton in West Yorkshire, the third of clergyman Patrick Bronte and his wife Maria’s five daughters, at age five Bronte lost her mother to cancer. Her older sisters Maria (1814) and Elizabeth (1815) died of tuberculosis in 1825. In 1848, as she celebrated the success of Jane Eyre, brother Branwell (1817) and sister Emily (1818) also died of tuberculosis. Anne (1820) died in 1849.

Historical Haworth, the home of 19th century author sisters Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte in Yorkshire, England.

Patrick Brunty was born in County Down, Ireland, in 1777, the eldest of 10 children. Initially apprenticed to a blacksmith, he won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, to study divinity and ancient and modern history, and became Patrick Bronte. Ordained into the Anglican ministry in 1807, he married Maria Branwell, daughter of a Penzance businessman, in 1812.

In 1820 Patrick was appointed to Haworth in West Yorkshire, described by a public health inspector as one of the least sanitary villages in England. Its water supply flowed through the burial ground, while half the population died before the age of six.

After Maria’s death, her sister Elizabeth moved to Haworth to care for her children. In July 1824 Patrick sent his older daughters to the new Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where Calvinist headmaster William Carus Wilson imposed harsh conditions and discipline.

Charlotte, who arrived with Emily in September, was beaten mercilessly. Seventy girls shared one outside toilet. In freezing conditions, they lived on starvation rations.

When a reader at Smith, Elder & Co publishers congratulated her on the vigour of her description of Lowood school punishments in Jane Eyre, Bronte told him it was all true, but she had avoided telling everything so as not to be accused of exaggeration, although Carus Wilson threatened to sue for defamation.

Painting of the Bronte sisters (from left) Anne, Emily and Charlotte by their brother Patrick Branwell Bronte.

Returning to Haworth after Maria and Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis, Bronte found Branwell and Anne entrenched as their aunt’s favourites. But a set of toy soldiers given by their father in 1828 provided distraction, becoming a focus of fantasy heroes and battles in mythical Angria, inspiring her first poems and stories. Repressed by Bronte and Branwell, Emily and Anne created an alternative nation, Gondal, a South Pacific island ruled by a queen.

Bronte and Emily moved to Brussels in 1842 to work as student-teachers in a school run by Constantin Heger and his wife Zoe. Intending to perfect their French and return home to open their own school, Bronte stayed two years, becoming infatuated with Heger. The extent of her feelings were revealed when four of her letters to him, which went unanswered, were published in 1913.

“Day and night I find neither rest nor peace — if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and angry with me,” she wrote. “You showed a little interest in me in days gone by when I was your pupil in Brussels — and I cling to the preservation of this little interest — I cling to it as I would cling on to life.”

Bronte’s unrequited love became the foundation for Villette, her love story and attack on conventions of her time that doomed many 19th-century women to submission and frustration.

Her views on Victorian conventions were already evident in her nom de plume, adopted because “we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice”.

Bronte found love when her father’s curate Arthur Nicholls proposed marriage, which she rejected. But friend and fellow author Elizabeth Gaskell encouraged her to reconsider.

Increasingly attracted to Nicholls, in January 1854 Bronte accepted his proposal and married in June. By then pregnant, she died of tuberculosis on March 31, 1855.