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For the next few weeks we will talk about the life of Charlotte Bronte. What inspired her to write Jane Eyre? What else was happening in the world at the time?

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The facts for today's history came from Britannica and Wikipedia.

Welcome to Bite at a Time Books Behind the Story where we answer the questions you have about your favorite classic authors. What inspired your favorite author to write their novels? What was going on in the world at the time? Follow along with us as we tell you what was happening in the world while your favorite authors wrote your favorite classics. My name is Bree Carlile and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you. If you enjoy our show, be sure to follow us so you get all the new episodes. If you want to see exclusive, behind the scenes of our show, join our Patreon! We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform, and share our show with your friends! You can catch us on all the social medias @biteatatimebooks. Our show is part of the Bite at a Time Books Productions network! If you would also like to hear a story by the author we are currently featuring, check out the Bite at a Time Books podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, right now we are reading Jane Eyre. Today we will be talking about the life of Charlotte Bronte.

Charlotte Bronte was a British author. She was born April 21st, 1816 in Thornton, England and died March 31st, 1855 at the age of 38 in Haworth, England. Her married name was Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls, and she went by the pseudonym Currer Bell. Bronte was of slight build and was less than five feet tall.

Charlotte’s father was Patrick Bronte 1777-1861, while born in Ireland he made the decision to change his surname from the common Brunty to the more distinguished Bronte. He was an Anglican clergyman, after serving in several parishes he and his wife Maria Branwell Bronte and their six small children moved to Haworth during the Yorkshire moors in 1820, after he was awarded a rectorship at St. Michael and All Angels Church. Shortly after their move his wife, Maria, died of cancer on September 15th, 1821, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and a son, Branwell. Their aunt Elizabeth Branwell moved in with them to help raise the children.

In August 1824, Patrick sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, which was near Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The tuition was low, the food not very good, and the discipline was harsh. Charlotte in later life condemned the school and it’s principal, saying that the school’s poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development, and she believed the conditions hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died of Tuberculosis in June 1825.

Charlotte and Emily came home in 1825, after the deaths of their sisters, and stayed home for 5 years, learning, playing, and writing and telling romantic stories, as well as making up their own games to play. Charlotte acted as “the motherly friend and guardian of her younger sisters.” During this time she wrote her first poem at the age of 13 in 1829, and would go on to write more than 200 poems over the course of her life. Many poems were published in their own homemade magazine Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine, and concerned the fictional world of Glass Town. She and her remaining siblings created their own shared world, and started to chronicle the lives and struggles of their imaginary kingdom in 1827. In private letters, Charlotte would refer to Glass Town as “her world below, a private escape where she could act out her desires and had multiple identities.” Charlotte had a predilection for romantic settings, passionate relationships, and high society at odds with Branwell’s obsession with battle’s and politics, and her younger sisters’ homely North Country realism, at this stage there is still a sense of the writings as a family enterprise.

From 1831 onwards, Emily and Anne created a spin-off called Gondal, which included many of their poems. After 1831 Charlotte and Branwell concentrated on evolving Glass Town Confederacy into what they now called Angria. Christine Alexander, a Bronte juvenilia historian, wrote “both Charlotte and Branwell ensured the consistency of their imaginary world. When Branwell exuberantly kills off important characters in his manuscripts, Charlotte comes to the rescue and, in effect, resurrects them for the next stories; and when Branwell becomes bored with his inventions, such as the Glass Town magazine he edits, Charlotte takes over his initiative and keeps the publication going for several more years.” The sagas the siblings created were episodic and elaborate, and they exist in incomplete manuscripts, some of which have been published as juvenilia. These manuscripts provided them with an obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence, which kicked off their literary vocations as adults.

In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, in Mirfield, where she met her lifelong friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. in the year she attended. One of the friends she made, Ellen Nussey, continued to write to her until her death. In 1832 she went home to teach her remaining sisters.

In 1833 she wrote a novella, The Green Dwarf, using the name Wellesley. Around 1833, her stories shifted from tales of the supernatural to more realistic stories.

In 1835 she returned to Roe Head as a teacher. Unhappy and lonely as a teacher at Roe Head, Bronte took out her sorrows in poetry, writing a series of melancholic poems. In “We wove a Web in Childhood” written in December 1835, Bronte drew a sharp contrast between her miserable life as a teacher and the vivid imaginary worlds she and her siblings had created. In another poem “Morning was its freshness still” written at the same time, Bronte wrote “Tis bitter sometimes to recall illusions once deemed fair.” Many of her poems concerned the imaginary world of Angria, often concerning Byronic heroes, and in December 1836 she wrote to the poem laureate Robert Southey asking him for encouragement of her career as a poet. Southey replied, famously, that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.” This advice she respected but did not heed. She wanted to help her family into a better position and as a school teacher seemed the only way she could do that. Her brother Branwell decided to be an artist which made it necessary for someone to help supplement the family income. Teaching and it’s restrictions was hard on Charlotte and she fell into bad health and melancholy, and finally in the summer of 1838 she decided to leave the school.

In 1839 Charlotte refused a proposal from Reverend Henry Nussey, who was her lifelong friend’s brother and another proposal a few months later by a young clergyman. During this time, she was trying to make the best of her talents to help pay off her brother’s debts, she decided to become a governess with the Whites at Upperwood House, Rawdon, a career she pursued until 1841. In particular, from May to July 1839 she was employed by the Sidgwick family at their summer residence, Stone Gappe, in Lothersdale, where one of her charges was John Benson Sidgwick (1835-1927), and unruly child who on one occasion threw the Bible at Charlotte, an incident which may have been the inspiration for a part of the opening chapter of Jane Eyre in which John Reed throws a book at the young Jane. Bronte did not enjoy her work as a governess, noting her employers treated her almost as a slave, constantly humiliating her. Her brother, Branwell, was good at writing and painting, his classical scholarship and social charm gave the family high hopes for him but he was fundamentally unstable, weak-willed, and intemperate. He could not keep a job and turned to alcohol and opium.

During all this, the three sisters planned to open a school together, with funding from their aunt, and in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as students to improve their qualifications in French and learn German, at the boarding school run by Constantine Heger (1809-1896) and his wife Claire Zoe Parent Heger (1804-1887). Their immense talent drew the notice of Constantine Heger, who was a good teacher and had an unusual perception. During her time in Brussels, Bronte, who favored the Protestant ideal of an individual in direct contact with God, objected to the stern Catholicism of Madame Heger, which she considered a tyrannical religion that enforced conformity and submission to the Pope. In return for board and tuition Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music. Their time at the schools was cut short when their aunt died of internal obstruction in October 1842, they made a trip home and then Charlotte returned to Brussels alone in January 1843 as a student-teacher. She continued to teach during 1843 but this time was homesick, lonely and depressed. Her friends had left Brussels and Madame Hegar started to seem jealous of her. Hegar had the most interesting mind among the people she had met and he recognized her talents. He had a strong and eccentric personality which appealed to her sense of humor and her affections. She offered him an innocent devotion but he repressed her emotions, however, she did write him what some would consider love letters. He suggested the letters were open to misapprehension and she decided to stop writing and apply herself to disciplining her feelings. This time in Brussels was crucial to her life, receiving literary training, learning about herself and she was able to start gathering material for her novels.

In January 1844 Charlotte returned to Haworth, and she decided to start a school in the parsonage, her father’s sight was failing and he was not able to be left alone. The school was advertised as “The Misses Bronte’s Establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of Young Ladies” While they did let people know they were starting a school and inquired for sources of funding, no pupils ever made the trek to Haworth, and the project was abandoned in October 1844.

In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte found some poems of Emily’s and they decided to publish together Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (pseudonyms for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) which was published in 1846. They wanted to avoid special treatment they believed would be given to them by reviewers if they published as women, however they did choose pseudonyms that would preserve their initials, Bell was the middle name of Haworth’s curate, Currer was the surname of Frances Mary Richardson Currer who had funded their school (and maybe their father). Of the decision to use noms de plume, Charlotte Wrote: “Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while 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; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.

They did have to fund the publication themselves and only two copies were sold and few reviews received. They believed that now was their chance to start publishing their novels, continuing to use their noms de plume when sending manuscripts to potential publishers.

Charlotte was unable to get The Professor: A Tale published but she was almost done writing Jane Eyre: An Autobiography which she had started in August 1846 while in Manchester with her father for an eye operation. When the publisher Smith, Elder and Company declined The Professor, they let her know they would consider a three volume novel with more action and excitement in it, which prompted her to complete Jane Eyre as quickly as she could. They accepted Jane Eyre and it was published less than 8 weeks later on October 16th, 1847 and was immediately more successful than her sister’s books which were published that same year. G.H. Lewes wrote that it was “an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit”, and declared that it consisted of “suspiria de profundis!” Speculation about the identity and gender of the mysterious Currer Bell heightened with the publication of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne). Accompanying the speculation was a change in the critical reaction to Bronte’s work, as accusations were made that the writing was “coarse,” a judgment more readily made once it was suspected that Currer Bell was a woman. However, sales of Jane Eyre continued to be strong and may even have increased as a result of the novel developing a reputation as an “improper” book. A Talented amateur artist, Bronte personally did the drawings for the second edition of Jane Eyre and in the summer of 1834 two of her paintings were shown at an exhibition by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Reeds.

In 1848 Bronte began the work of her second novel, Shirley. It was only partially completed when the Bronte family suffered the deaths of three of its members within eight months. Her brother Branwell died in September of 1848 of chronic bronchitis and marasmus, exacerbated by heavy drinking, although Bronte believed his death was due to Tuberculosis. Branwell may have had a laudanum addiction as well. Emily became seriously ill shortly after his funeral and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1848, and Anne died of the same disease in May of 1849. Bronte was unable to write during this time.

After Anne’s death Bronte resumed writing as a way to deal with her grief, and Charlotte finished her book Shirley: A Tale in the empty parsonage, which was released in October. Unlike Jane Eyre, which is written in the first person, Shirley is written in the third person and lacks the emotional immediacy of her first novel, and reviewers found it less shocking. Bronte, as her late sister’s heir, suppressed the republication of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Windfell Hall, an action which had a deleterious effect on Anne’s popularity as a novelist and has remained controversial among the sisters’ biographers ever since.

In view of the success of her novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Bronte was persuaded by her publishers to go to London three times as a guest of her publisher, where she revealed her true identity and began to move in more exalted social circles, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, and there she met novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, met G.H. Lewes, and sat for her portrait to be done by George Richmond. She never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time, as she did not want to leave her aging father. Thackeray's daughter, writer Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, recalled a visit to her father by Brontë:

…two gentlemen come in, leading a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, with fair straight hair and steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little barège dress with a pattern of faint green moss. She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness; our hearts are beating with wild excitement. This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating; some people even say our father wrote the books – the wonderful books. …The moment is so breathless that dinner comes as a relief to the solemnity of the occasion, and we all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm; for, genius though she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow. My own personal impressions are that she is somewhat grave and stern, specially to forward little girls who wish to chatter. …Everyone waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. Miss Brontë retired to the sofa in the study, and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess… the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant, my father was too much perturbed by the gloom and the silence to be able to cope with it at all… after Miss Brontë had left, I was surprised to see my father opening the front door with his hat on. He put his fingers to his lips, walked out into the darkness, and shut the door quietly behind him… long afterwards… Mrs Procter asked me if I knew what had happened. …It was one of the dullest evenings [Mrs Procter] had ever spent in her life… the ladies who had all come expecting so much delightful conversation, and the gloom and the constraint, and how finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone off to his club.

In 1851 she lived with Harriet Martineau and also visited who would eventually write her biography, Elizabeth Gaskell in Manchester and entertained her at Haworth. During this time she declined her third offer of marriage from James Taylor who belonged to her publishing house, Smith, Elder and Company. Her book Villette was published in January of 1853. A substantial amount of the novel’s dialogue is in the French language. Villette marked Bronte’s return to writing from a first-person perspective, the technique she had used in Jane Eyre. Another similarity to Jane Eyre lies in the use of aspects of her own life as inspiration for fictional events, in particular her reworking of the time she spent at the pensionnat in Brussels. Villette was acknowledged by critics of the day as a potent and sophisticated piece of writing although it was criticized for “coarseness” and for not being suitably “feminine” in its portrayal of Lucy’s desires.

Before the publication of Villette, Bronte received an expected proposal of marriott from her fourth suitor, her father’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817-1906), who was an Irishman and had long been in love with her. She initially refused him and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls’s poor financial status. Elizabeth Gaskell, who believed that marriage provided “clear and defined duties” that were beneficial for a woman, encouraged Bronte to consider the positive aspects of such a union and tried to use her contacts to engineer an improvement in Nicholl’s finances. According to James Pope-Hennessy in The Flight of Youth, it was the generosity of Richard Monckton Milnes that made the marriage possible. Bronte meanwhile was increasingly attracted to Nicholls, and although it took several months to win her father’s consent, she had accepted his proposal in January 1854 and got married on June 29th, 1854, in Haworth church. At that last minute her father decided he could not give her away at her wedding and she made her way to the church without him. They went to Ireland for their honeymoon and then returned to Haworth, where her new husband pledged himself to be the curate to her father. Arthur did not share his wife’s intellectual life, but she was happy to be loved for who she was and to take up her duties as his wife.

Bronte became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and, according to Gaskell, she was attacked by “sensations of perpetual nausea and ever recurring faintness.” She died, with her unborn child on March 31st, 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday. Her death certificate gives the cause of death as phthisis, i.e. consumption (not tuberculosis, which was only one of many diseases included in this now outdated classification), but biographers including Claire Harman and other suggest that she died from dehydration and malnourishment due to vomiting caused by severe morning sickness or hyperemesis gravidarum. Bronte was buried in the family vault in the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Haworth. She started to write another book, titled Emma, but never finished, although some pages do remain.

The Professor, the first novel Bronte had written, was published posthumously in 1857. The fragment of a new novel she had been writing in her last years has been twice completed by recent authors, the more famous version being Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Bronte by Clare Boylan in 2003. Most of her writings about the imaginary country Angria have also been published since her death. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.

The daughter of an Irish Anglican clergyman, Brontë was herself an Anglican. In a letter to her publisher, she claims to "love the Church of England. Her Ministers indeed, I do not regard as infallible personages, I have seen too much of them for that – but to the Establishment, with all her faults – the profane Athanasian Creed excluded – I am sincerely attached."

In a letter to Ellen Nussey she wrote:

If I could always live with you, and "daily" read the [B]ible with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time, drink the same draught from the same pure fountain of Mercy – I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better, than my evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit, and warm to the flesh will now permit me to be.”

Elizabeth Gaskell's biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. It was an important step for a leading female novelist to write a biography of another, and Gaskell's approach was unusual in that, rather than analyzing her subject's achievements, she concentrated on private details of Brontë's life, emphasizing those aspects that countered the accusations of "coarseness" that had been leveled at her writing. The biography is frank in places, but omits details of Brontë's love for Héger, a married man, as being too much of an affront to contemporary morals and a likely source of distress to Brontë's father, widower, and friends. Mrs Gaskell also provided doubtful and inaccurate information about Patrick Brontë, claiming that he did not allow his children to eat meat. This is refuted by one of Emily Brontë's diary papers, in which she describes preparing meat and potatoes for dinner at the parsonage. It has been argued that Gaskell's approach transferred the focus of attention away from the 'difficult' novels, not just Brontë's, but all the sisters', and began a process of sanctification of their private lives.

On 29 July 1913 The Times of London printed four letters Brontë had written to Constantin Héger after leaving Brussels in 1844. Written in French except for one postscript in English, the letters broke the prevailing image of Brontë as an angelic martyr to Christian and female duties that had been constructed by many biographers, beginning with Gaskell. The letters, which formed part of a larger and somewhat one-sided correspondence in which Héger frequently appears not to have replied, reveal that she had been in love with a married man, although they are complex and have been interpreted in numerous ways, including as an example of literary self-dramatization and an expression of gratitude from a former pupil.

In 1980 a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), on the site of the Madam Heger's school, in honor of Charlotte and Emily.[55] In May 2017 the plaque was cleaned.

A three-volume edition of her letters, The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, edited by Margaret Smith, was published in 1995-2004. Her full list of works include the following:

Juvenilia

The Spell

The Secret

Lily Hart

The Foundling

Albion and Marina

Tales of the Islanders

Mina Laury

Stancliffe's Hotel

The Duke of Zamorna

Henry Hastings

Caroline Vernon

The Roe Head Journal Fragments 

Farewell to Angria

The Green Dwarf, A Tale of the Perfect Tense was written in 1833 under the pseudonym Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley. It shows the influence of Walter Scott, and Brontë's modifications to her earlier gothic style have led Christine Alexander to comment that, in the work, "it is clear that Brontë was becoming tired of the gothic mode per se".

"At the end of 1839, Brontë said goodbye to her fantasy world in a manuscript called Farewell to Angria. More and more, she was finding that she preferred to escape to her imagined worlds over remaining in reality – and she feared that she was going mad. So she said goodbye to her characters, scenes and subjects. She wrote of the pain she felt at wrenching herself from her 'friends' and venturing into lands unknown".

Novels

Poetry

Thank you for joining Bite at a Time Books Behind the Story today while we answered some of the questions you have about one of your favorite classic authors. If you enjoy our show, be sure to follow us so you get all the new episodes. If you want to see exclusive, behind the scenes of our show, join our Patron! We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform, and share our show with your friends! You can catch us on all the social medias @biteatatimebooks. Also, Be sure to check us our on website www.biteatatimebooksbehindthestory.com. Our show is part of the Bite at a Time Books Productions network! If you would also like to hear a story by the author we are currently featuring, check out the Bite at a Time Books podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, right now we are reading Jane Eyre. Again my name is Bree Carlile and I hope you come back next week when we answer more questions about one of your favorite classic authors.