Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Her mother died when she was five. At eight she was sent with three of her sisters to a cheap boarding school for clergymen's daughters where the food was bad and the discipline harsh; her two elder sisters caught tuberculosis there and died within weeks of each other in 1825.

She, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell made up elaborate imaginary kingdoms and wrote them down in tiny books. At twenty she sent poems to the poet laureate, Robert Southey, who replied that literature could not be the business of a woman's life. She kept his letter and kept writing, through years of miserable work as a teacher and governess and an unrequited attachment to a married teacher in Brussels.

In 1846 the three sisters paid to publish a book of poems under male pseudonyms. It sold two copies. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was rejected by every publisher who saw it. Her second, Jane Eyre, was accepted within weeks in 1847 and was an immediate sensation, though readers argued about whether Currer Bell could be a woman.

Within a year Branwell, Emily and Anne were all dead. Charlotte wrote Shirley and Villette alone in the parsonage with her father, married his curate in 1854 and died the following spring, aged 38, in the early months of pregnancy.