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“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

As before, Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), the English author of the Gothic romance Jane Eyre (1847), is remembered this year, too. April 21 was her 198th birthday. Charlotte was the eldest of the three Bronte literary sisters, the two others being Emily (1818-1848), the author of Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne (1820-1849), the author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre features a story of a plain governess (Jane) going through difficulties in her early life and falling in love with her employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester, the master of Thornfield Hall. Jane knows nothing about his insane first wife (Bertha Antoinetta Mason) who commits suicide after setting fire to Thornfield Hall. Rochester loses an eye and a hand and becomes blind in the remaining eye. Jane offers to take care of him, and he asks her to marry him. And they marry in a quiet wedding. This work was also made into a drama film in Britain, in 2011.

Conscious of the social prejudice against women at the time, Charlotte used a gender-neutral penname, Currer Bell, when she published Jane Eyre, her distinctively pioneering feminist work. It became so popular that she had to print it a second time only two months after its first printing. After it was known that the author was a woman, it created a stirring sensation in the English literary world.

After the success of her novels, her publisher persuaded her to visit London occasionally. In London, she revealed her true identity and moved into social circles, where she became friends with many female writers, such as Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), her future biographer. She married Arthur Bell Nicholls (1819-1906), her father’s curate, in 1854, and died with her unborn child in March, 1855, at age 38.