Villette by Currer Bell

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote tiny books about them. Her two elder sisters died after a harsh boarding school, the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.

After working as a teacher and governess and studying in Brussels, she published poems with her sisters under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and in 1847 Jane Eyre made her famous. She outlived all her siblings, married in 1854 and died the following year. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights.