Charlotte, as well as her sister Emily, follow their two older sisters to attend a school in Wakefield, which later prooves to be the basis for the school in Jane Eyre.

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by Ajia Brooks

It was around this time that Charlotte and her sisters attened  Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge; which influenced in Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

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by Zwe Wintzaw

The Brontes' father brought home wooden soldiers for his wife, but instead the girls began to play with them. Charlotte, Emily, and Ann took the soldiers, and wrote about an imaginary world that the soldiers were living in (Cody, The Victorian Web). This development is crucial, because it shows the early literary inspirations of the Bronte sisters, and how at a young age they were able to create fiction, whether or not they knew that is what they were doing. It's fascinating to have record of some early habits of a writer, particularly those who would be considered "the greats," if you will.

Citation:

Cody, David. “Charlotte Bronte: A Brief Biography.” Charlotte Bronte: A Brief Biography, The Victorian Web, 1987, victorianweb.org/authors/bront….

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by Jacob Dunn

At the age of 18, Queen Victoria assumes the throne.

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by Olivia Tower

In 1839, Charlotte Brontë declined proposals from two clergymen, one of which was from Reverend Henry Nussey, her friend Ellen's brother. This came after Brontë had already broken one engagement.

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by Anna Calabrese

After her novel, The Professor, got rebuffed she began working on Jane Eyre while nursing her father back to health.

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by Ajia Brooks

Originally published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Jane Erye was published and recieved mixed recpetion. Some praised the descriptive prose, character realism, and creativity. While other critics viewed it as an anti-authoritarian, anti-christian message. The reason behind the critism exists because Jane creates a happiness for herself without intervention from man or God. Regardless of the kind of reaction the book gives, it is important that it was able to elicit strong reactions from almost all who reviewed it, perhaps a testament to its artistic status.

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by Ian Carlson

Charlotte Brontë's character Bertha (Rochester's previous wife) in Jane Eyre inspires the title and content of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's text, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. This piece of criticism shifted the focus of feminist literary criticism from examining representations of women in literature by men to literature by women, and was immensely popular. The Madwoman in the Attic analyzed women writing through a social and historical lense, and viewed it as a form of establishing identity. Though it is sometimes criticized as "racist and heterosexist", the influence of The Madwoman in the Attic remains far-reaching, even today. Many have argued that it has allowed for a more close consideration of gender presentations in previous canon texts, such as Milton's Paradise Lost.

Works Cited: Gezari, Janet. “Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 264–279. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/escrit/cgl003.

STERNLIEB, LISA. “Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 1, 2012, pp. 114–116. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/sdn.2012.0000

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by Anna Calabrese

Thus far, many scholars who read The Madwoman in the Attic viewed female "madness" as a kind of rebellion against a patriarchal system. "Madness" had also been connected to women's imaginations and written works as a way to escape the confines of social and cultural expectations, and as a way to form identity and assert oneself in one's own narrative. Yet, later scholarship suggests that this positive view of "madness" may not have been one applied to Bertha Mason by Charlotte Brontë, whose portrayal of Bertha was considered by some to be "unsympathetic". In 1985, a further attempt to cast Bertha as a sympathetic character was made by Jean Rhys, who wrote The Wide Sargasso Sea as a way of explaining the potential causes of Bertha's "madness". Scholar Elizabeth J. Donaldson posits that approaching Bertha through this lense that focuses on her mental illness rather than as a symbol of "rebellion" allows for feminist theorists to examine the presentation of women's mental health by women writers instead of confining feminist interpretations to the parameters of social rebellion. While this has merit, considering the mental health of women characters, how it reflects the attitudes and potential feelings of the author, and what these presentations say about the culture contemporary to them is still a valuable way to understand the social implications of characteristics considered "other", and how women authors may have used their mediums to combat or critique this.

Works Cited: Donaldson, Elizabeth J. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal: National Women’s Studies Association Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 99–119. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/nws.2002.14.3.99.

 “Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, July 2006, pp. 264–279. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/escrit/cgl003.

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by Anna Calabrese