Charlotte Brontë
Tony Rossiter explains how she created an unconventional heroine with a feminist perspective
The techniques and tricks of …
Published in 1847, Jane Eyre was a literary sensation. Despite its orthodox romantic structure (attraction, impediment, final marital resolution), it was a revolutionary novel. Coming up to the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth (21 April 1816), it’s worth considering how this quiet parson’s daughter, whose social circle centred almost exclusively on her father’s profession, came to produce what is generally regarded as one of England’s greatest works of fiction. She completed four novels (The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette), but I’ll concentrate on Jane Eyre.
Beginnings
In 1820, at the age of four, Charlotte, the third of six children, moved with her parents and siblings from Thornton, near Bradford, to Haworth, where her father had been appointed perpetual curate. Four years later she was sent, with her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Emily, to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. After less than a year there both Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis, and Patrick Brontë removed Charlotte and Emily from the school.
It was after her return from Cowan Bridge that Charlotte and her surviving siblings, Branwell, Emily and Anne, began to create their imaginary fictional worlds. Branwell and Charlotte wrote episodic sagas about the inhabitants of their imagined kingdom of Angria, while Emily and Anne wrote articles and poems about Gondal. These provided Charlotte and her siblings with an obsessive interest that sustained them throughout their childhood and early adolescence. This was their writing apprenticeship.
Some of the tiny manuscripts they produced can be seen in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Amazingly, the total length of this Brontë juvenalia – and Charlotte was the principal author – exceeds that of their published works.