Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was the third of six children born to Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë on 21 April 1816. Her mother died when she was five, and at eight she was sent to Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where conditions were so grim her two elder sisters fell ill and died; she blamed the place for her own frail health and later turned it into Lowood School in her fiction. She taught, worked briefly as a governess, then went to Brussels in 1842 to study at the Heger Pensionnat, where she fell for the married director, Constantin Heger - a doomed attachment that fed both The Professor and the character of Rochester. Back in England, she and her sisters Emily and Anne tried to open a school and failed to draw a single pupil, so in 1846 they published poems as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell instead. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 under the Currer Bell name, igniting praise and fury in equal measure; the sisters' identities came out the next year. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, became pregnant, and died seven months later on 31 March 1855, possibly of tuberculosis or complications from severe morning sickness.