Charlotte Brontë is best known as the author of the classic novel “Jane Eyre” published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847. Her two sisters, Emily and Anne (aka Ellis and Acton Bell) also made massive contributions to English literature with Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, respectively. The character of Jane Eyre, who suffers childhood deprivations but maintains a strong and enduring dignity, is an integral part of our literary heritage, a timeless character to whom all good things come eventually. How this isolated, motherless daughter of a clergyman came up with the scenario and personages that illuminate the plot of Jane Eyre is almost unfathomable. Nonetheless, she did. And by the time she died, in 1855 at the age of 38, she had already lost her mother, four sisters and a brother, her marriage was less than a year old, and the child with whom she was pregnant died with her. Thank goodness for us she was able to manage what she did in that short, bedeviled life!
