BRONTE, CHARLOTTE, one of the most distinguished of modern novelists, was born at Thornton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on the 21st of April, 1816. Her father, a clergyman of Irish descent, removed, with six young children and an invalid wife, from Thornton to Haworth, in the same county, in 1821. Soon after their arrival, Mrs. Broute died, so that Charlotte, trying hard in after-life, could but dimly recall the remembrance of her mother. Her father, eccentric and solitary in his habits, and full of extravagant theories for making his children hardy and stoical, was ill fitted to replace a mother's love. When Charlotte wits eight years old, she was sent with three of her sisters to Cowan's Bridge school, which, whether deservedly or not, had an unfortunate notoriety conferred upon it 25 years later in the pages of Jane Eyre. Her two eldest sisters falling dangerously ill, and dying a few days after their removal thence, and the low situation evidently disagreeing with Charlotte's health, she was sent home when little more than nine, and remained there, " the motherly friend and guar dian of her younger sisters," till, in 1831, she was sent to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, where her remarkable talents Were duly appreciated by her kind instructress, and friendships formed with some of her fellow-pupils that lasted throughout life. A few years later, she returned to Miss Wooler's school as teacher there, and also had some sorrowful experiences as governess in one or two families. It was with a view of better qualifying themselves for the task of teaching that Charlotte and her sister Emily went to Brussels in 1842, and took up their abode in a pensionnat. When Charlotte returned home in 1844, a new shadow darkened the gloomy Yorkshire parsonage. Her father's sight was declining fast, and her only brother was a source of continual anxiety. It now seemed plain that school-keeping could never be a resource, and the sisters turned their thoughts to literature. Their volume of poems was published in 1846; their names
being veiled under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, but it met with little or no attention. Charlotte's next venture was a prose tale, The Professor, and while it was passing slowly and heavily from publisher to publisher, Jane Eyre was making progress. In the Aug. of 1847, it was submitted to Messrs. Smith & Elder, and published by them two months later. It took the public by storm. It was felt that a fresh hand, making new harmonies, was thrown over the old instrument. Henceforward, Charlotte B. had a " twofold life, as author and woman." Over the latter the clouds closed thicker and thicker. Mr. Bronte had indeed recovered his sight; but the sister Charlotte so intensely loved, and whose genius she ever delighted to exalt above her own, Emily—the Ellis Bell of lathering Heights—died in 1848. Her only brother also died in the same year; and Anne, the youngest of the family, following in 1849, Char lotte was left alone with her aged father in that dreary deserted home among the graves. Nevertheless, her energy never flagged. Shirley, begun soon after the appearance of Jane Eyre, was published in the autumn of 1849; and written -under the fre quent pressure of had health and low spirits, came out in 1852. In the spring of 1854, Charlotte B. was married to her father's curate, the Rev. A. Nicholls, who had long known and loved her. It is a relief to find that a little bright sunshine was permitted to the close of a hitherto clouded life. It was, however, but brief; for serious ill ness set in, and on the 31st of Mar., 1855, she died. A fragment of an unfinished novel appeared in.the Cornhill _Magazine for April, 1860. See Mrs. Gaskell's Life of C. B. (1857).