Born in Yorkshire on April 21, 1816, Charlotte Brontë was the third child of clergyman Patrick Brontë, rector of Hayworth, and Maria Branwell Brontë. Living a sequestered life with her four sisters and one brother, Charlotte read voraciously and rambled on the moors. Her mother died of stomach cancer when she was five, after which the four eldest girls suffered from protracted hunger, illness, and cold at the harsh Clergy Daughters’ School at the Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, model for the Lowood School of Jane Eyre. In fact, Charlotte’s two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died at the school before Charlotte and her younger sister Emily were withdrawn and brought home in 1825. Together, the four remaining Brontë children (Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell) created vividly detailed imaginary worlds in story form, recording them in miniature volumes written in minute script. The three sisters, when adults, drew on these early literary efforts and published a book of poems together under the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, neutral appellations that could have belonged to men at a time when female authors were “liable to be looked on with prejudice” (Brontë in Gordon, pp.
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