Charlotte Brontë was not in any formal sense a proponent of women's rights, but in her writing she speaks out strongly against the injustices suffered by women in a society that restricts their freedom of action and exploits their dependent status. Her protests grew out of her own experience, which provided much of the material for her fiction; though she once insisted that "we only suffer reality to
Suggest, never to
dictate," her novels include many characters and incidents recognizably drawn from her life, and her heroines have much in common with their creator.
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Her father, Patrick Brontë (1777-1861), a native of County Down in Ireland, had risen above the poverty of his family to become an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, and in 1807 was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In 1812 he met, courted, and married Maria Branwell (1783-1821), a pious and educated young woman from Cornwall. Their life together was tragically brief; Maria bore six children in seven years (Maria in 1813; Elizabeth, 1815; Charlotte; Patrick Branwell, 1817; Emily Jane, 1818; Anne, 1820), then died of cancer in 1821 at the age of thirty-eight.
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