Charlotte Brontë’s Life

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë lived most of her life as the dutiful daughter of an Irish clergyman and died as the attentive wife of her father’s Irish curate. Yet even from her earliest years this diminutive, short-sighted, desperately shy woman nourished a feverish creativity and ambition, and in the ten short years of her artistic maturity she created some of the century’s most potent heroines and rose to be acclaimed as the most distinguished female author of her time, the writer who, more than any other, ‘impressed her mark so clearly on contemporary literature’ and drew ‘so many followers to her peculiar path’.¹ This apparent disjunction between the modesty of Charlotte Brontë’s life and person and the magnitude of her literary achievement is symptomatic of a life and character fraught with contradiction, division and ambivalence.

… it is well that the true poet, quiet externally though he may be, has often a truculent spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness, and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having followed. (S 49)