Charlotte Brontė was born in 1816, the third daughter of Revd Patrick and Maria Brontė. A son and two more daughters were born later. Mrs Brontė died in 1821, Charlotte's elder sisters died in 1825, her brother and a sister died in 1848, and her other sister died in 1849, all of tuberculosis. Her father died in 1861.
In 1824 she was sent to Cowan Bridge School with a younger sister to join her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, but after Maria died in 1825 they were sent home where Elizabeth soon died. The remaining children remained at home until 1830 under the supervision of her mother's sister. The four children wrote many short stories and poems for several years. Charlotte went to Roe Head school early in 1831, and left in the middle of 1832. She returned to the school as a teacher in 1835 and left in 1838 to return home. She spent short periods as a governess, went to Mme. Heger's school in Brussels in 1842, and returned there as a teacher the next year. She seems to have become infatuated with M. Hegel, and wrote many intense letters to him after she returned home in 1844.
Her first novel,
The Professor, was written in 1846, but not accepted by several publishers.
Jane Eyre was published late in 1847 (under a pseudonym) to instant acclaim, and outsold
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. Later gossip claimed that the author of
Jane Eyre was the person on whom the character of Becky Sharp was based. Despite being painfully shy she sought and gained the friendship of Harriet Martineau, Thackeray, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Having refused at least three earlier proposals of marriage from other men she accepted a proposal from her father's curate, married him in June 1854, and died during early pregnancy in March 1855.
Jane Eyre is a first person retrospective narrative of a young girl who had been orphaned as an infant, and her relationships with two dominant men. 'I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt.'
The text source was a file from Project Gutenberg Australia, checked against the Penguin Classics edition. The text is replete with archaic and literary words which I have left intact apart from silently changing doating to doting. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, added diacritics, and indented lines of poetry, set off letters and documents as blockquotes, and made changes to hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com. The cover is based on a portrait in the Natonal Portrait Gallery.
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