After the death of the two oldest Brontë daughters, Patrick and Maria’s sister Elizabeth gave the children a stimulating and wide-ranging education at home. Four years later her two older sisters died as a result of the harsh conditions in the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire to which they and the eight-year-old Charlotte were sent in 1824.Ĭharlotte’s experiences at the school influenced her portrayal of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Charlotte was only five in 1821 when her mother Maria died. She was the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish crofter’s son who rose via a Cambridge education to become, in 1820, a perpetual curate at Haworth, in Yorkshire. Most famous for her passionate novel Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë also published poems and three other novels. ‘I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette‘ If you liked Villette, you may enjoy Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, also available in Penguin Classics.

The Professor was posthumously published in 1857. She died during her pregnancy on 31 March 1855 in Haworth, Yorkshire. In 1854 Charlotte Brontë married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under the pen-name Currer Bell, and was followed by Shirley (1848) and Vilette (1853). Cooper’s new introduction places the novel in the context of Brontë’s life and career and argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism.Ĭharlotte Brontë (1816-55), eldest of the Brontë sisters, was born in Thornton, West Yorkshire. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë’sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. There, she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings – first for the school’s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls’ boarding school in the small town of Villette. Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s powerful autobiographical novel of one woman’s search for true love, edited with an introduction by Helen M.

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