Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell)

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was raised in the isolated stone parsonage of Haworth on the wind-swept Yorkshire moors by her clergyman father Patrick Brontë. Surviving the tragic early deaths of her mother and two eldest sisters at the harsh Cowan Bridge clergy daughters' school (the model for Lowood School), Charlotte and her surviving siblings Emily, Anne, and Branwell escaped into the fantasy kingdoms of Angria and Gondal.

Writing under the male pseudonym *Currer Bell*, Charlotte published Jane Eyre in October 1847. Centered on an impoverished, plain orphan governess who falls in love with the brooding Edward Rochester at Thornfield Hall, the novel shocked and thrilled Victorian Britain with its moral independence and raw emotional equality ('I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will'). Charlotte outlived all her siblings before dying in pregnancy at age thirty-eight.