Charlotte Bronte

1816, us the third of six children, to Maria and

her husband Patrick Bronte. In 1820, the family moved a few miles to Haworth, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate.

sisters, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, to the Clergy Daughters' School

at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Its poor conditions, which Charlotte maintained, permanently affected her health and physical development and hastened the deaths of her two elder sisters, Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who died of tuberculosis in June 1825. Soon after their father removed them from the school.

to 32, where she met her lifelong friends and correspondents,

Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.During this period, she wrote her novella The Green Dwarf (1833) under the name of Wellesley. Charlotte worked as a teacher from 1835 to 1838.

published a joint collection of poetry under the assumed names

of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Although only two copies were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels. Charlotte used "Currer Bell" when she published her first two novels.

1853
Emma, unfinished; Charlotte Bronte wrote only 20 pages of the

manuscript, published posthumously in 1860. In recent decades, at least two continuations of this fragment have appeared:
Emma, by "Charlotte Brontë and Another Lady", published 1980;
Emma Brown, by Clare Boylan, published 2003.

was published in London, England, in 1847. The novel merges

elements of three distinct genres. It has the form of a Bildungsroman, a story about a child's maturation, focusing on the emotions and experiences that accompany growth to adulthood. The novel also contains much social criticism, with a strong sense of morality at its core, and finally has the brooding and moody quality and Byronic character typical of Gothic fiction.

father's curate and, in the opinion of many scholars, the

model for several of her literary characters such as Jane Eyre's Rochester and St. John. She became pregnant soon after the marriage. Her health declined rapidly during this time, and according to Gaskell, her earliest biographer, she was attacked by "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness."

1855, at the young age of 38. Her death certificate

gives the cause of death as phthisis (tuberculosis), but many biographers suggest she may have died from more serious desease. There is also evidence to suggest that Charlotte died from typhus she may have caught from Tabitha Ackroyd, the Brontë household's oldest servant, who died shortly before her. Charlotte was interred in the family vault in The Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.