Shirley

Charlotte Brontë was a renowned Victorian novelist. She was the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose works are considered classics of English literature. Brontë was born in 1816 in Yorkshire and was the third of six children, all of whom died young. By 1849, she was the last of them living and she herself died aged 39, in 1855. From their childhood, the Brontës loved storytelling and were prolific writers from a young age. Brontë worked as a governess, one of the few types of employment a woman of her class could take at the time, before opening a school with her sisters Emily and Anne at the family home in Haworth, Yorkshire in 1839. The sisters struggled to make this financially viable and turned to writing to support themselves. The three Brontë sisters all wrote under gender-neutral pseudonyms, sharing the last name “Bell,” Charlotte calling herself “Currer Bell.” All three sisters became celebrated authors and admitted to their pseudonyms in 1848. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers but her second, Jane Eyre, was published to great critical and popular acclaim in 1847. She would follow this with Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). The serious and proto-feminist themes of these later novels made them the subject of some controversy and, although they met with acclaim in literary circles, they did not reach the popular success of Jane Eyre.