Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

Charlotte was the oldest surviving daughter of the three remarkable Brontë sisters, who were raised by their father in the mid-nineteenth century in a strict Church of England parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. She and her siblings had unusual and mostly solitary childhoods, centered on an imaginary kingdom they devised, for whose inhabitants they wrote obsessive, elaborate adventures.

From Jane Eyre:

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”

A scheme to open a school came to nothing when no students applied, but they desperately needed an income, so Charlotte arranged for the publication of the Brontë girls’ poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Soon after, she published her first novel, Jane Eyre, a bestseller that brought her the then-amazing income of £500. The book, with its beloved, fiercely independent heroine and bittersweet ending, has endured as well as any English novel.

Charlotte, though devastated by the early deaths of her two sisters (Emily died in 1848, at age thirty, and Anne died in 1849, at age twenty-nine), not only wrote a second novel but made many friends among the English literati, including William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell. In 1854, she married her father’s curate, Arthur B. Nicholls. She wasn’t in love with him, but she was scarred by her losses and greatly moved at the depth of his love for her.

Less than a year later, pregnant with her first child, she contracted pneumonia and died just before her thirty-ninth birthday.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Villette. At the height of her artistic power, Charlotte Brontë drew on her loneliness after the death of her three siblings to write Villette, her most accomplished and deeply felt work.

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Negus (Mulled Wine)

In Brontë’s famed novel, Jane Eyre arrives at Thornfield, home of the absent Mr. Rochester, to become governess to Adela Varens. Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, offers her a little hot negus, a mulled wine popular in Victorian times.

1 pint port wine

1 quart water

1/4 lb. sugar

Juice of one lemon

1 orange wheel

Cinnamon stick

Star anise

Grated nutmeg

Put the wine into a pitcher. In a saucepan, bring water to a boil. Add the sugar, lemon juice, and grated nutmeg. Pour the boiling water into the jug, stir, and add orange wheel, cinnamon stick and star anise. Serves 9–10.