Simi Valley High School Library

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Charlotte Brontë, Trailblazer

April 21 is the birthday of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), the English novelist and poet best known as the author of Jane Eyre. Along with her sisters, Anne (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) and Emily (Wuthering Heights), she was a literary trailblazer whose iconic stories and (for the time) daring social commentary made her a polarizing figure in her lifetime and an inspiration to subsequent generations. The oldest surviving child of an Anglo-Irish clergyman and his Cornish wife (who died when Charlotte was five), Charlotte was determined to earn her keep from her writing, despite daunting literary rejection and intense societal pressure to turn to more "womanly" pursuits. (To get around such prejudice, she used the pseudonym Currer Bell; Jane Eyre had been in print for a year before the publisher discovered that its runaway best-seller had been written by a woman).

Through the mysterious alchemy of literary genius, all three Brontë sisters transformed childhood tragedy, unhappy boarding-school experiences, and keen observances of the people and harsh landscape of their native Yorkshire, into masterworks whose universal themes of belonging vs. independence, love vs. hate, and forgiveness vs. revenge still resonate today. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights remain perennial best-sellers in their own right; and the sisters' works and lives continue to inspire adaptations and retellings, both fictional and nonfictional, in both books and film. Charlotte, the oldest among them, only lived to age 38, and died childless; but through their life's work and literary "offspring," she and her sisters have achieved immortality.