Color image of English novelist Charlotte Brontë with book in hand.

Charlotte Brontë

(1816 - 1855)

Raised in a parsonage amid the moors of Haworth, Charlotte and her siblings started their writing careers early, creating imaginary worlds and filling them with stories. Charlotte and Branwell’s country was named Angria; one of her surviving books set in the place, titled Something About Arthur, is twenty-five pages long, measuring 2.25 by 3.6 inches. She later wrote, originally under the pen name Currer Bell, Jane Eyre and Villette. The eldest of the Brontës outlasted all of her siblings, dying during her first pregnancy at the age of thirty-eight in 1855.

All Writing

Miscellany

Emily and Charlotte Brontë, insomniacs both, would walk together in circles around the dining room table until they were tired enough to sleep. When Emily died and Charlotte suffered alone, her insomnia worsened; she added to her route, often wandering down neighborhood streets and into the cemetery until daybreak.

Voices In Time

1833 | Whitcross

Under the Heavens

Charlotte Brontë looks for answers in the stars and on the heath.More

Miscellany

Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend about a woman who “must be a regular bore with her unfortunate homophobia,” advising, “Don’t look for that word in the dictionary.” This may indicate, notes a scholar, “fear or dislike of men,” from the Latin homo (man), not the Greek homo (same). The word is unclear in the manuscript; it could also be monophobia, fear of being alone.

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear. 

—Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Voices In Time

1839 | Stonegappe

Hands Full

Charlotte Brontë overworked and overwhelmed.More

Miscellany

“Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me,” Charlotte Brontë at the age of thirty-three wrote on June 13, 1849.

Voices In Time

1849 | Filey

Gone Like Dreams

Charlotte Brontë grieves for her brother and sisters.More

Issues Contributed