00:30Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.
00:37Charlotte Bronte.
00:39Charlotte Bronte was born on the 21st of April, 1816, in the village of Thornton, West Riding, Yorkshire.
00:46Her father, Patrick Bronte, graduated from St. John's College at Cambridge and was ordained as a priest in the Church of England.
00:54He was also a minor poet, publishing his first book of verse in 1811.
01:00Charlotte's mother died when her daughter was only five years old.
01:04In 1824, when she was eight years old, Charlotte joined her older sisters at the Clergy Daughters School.
01:11Charlotte found the rigors of boarding school life harsh in the extreme.
01:15Food was badly prepared under unsanitary conditions and, as a consequence, outbreaks of low fever or typhus forced the withdrawal of many students.
01:24Her sister Maria also fell ill and died.
01:28Suddenly becoming the eldest child in a motherless family forced Charlotte into a position of leadership and instilled in her a sometimes almost overwhelming sense of responsibility.
01:39Bronte had been writing poetry and stories since her youth.
01:42Bronte was a voracious reader during her childhood and teen years, and she wrote stories and staged plays at home with her siblings.
01:50With her brother Branwell especially, she wrote manuscripts, plays, and stories, drawing on literature, magazines, and the Bible for inspiration.
01:58In her late teens and early twenties, Bronte worked on and off as a teacher and governess.
02:04In between writing, she taught at a schoolhouse, but didn't like the long hours.
02:08She wrote her first novella, The Green Dwarf, in 1833, under the pen name, Wellesley.
02:16In 1845, a quite significant event that started small happened.
02:21Charlotte found Emily's poetry notebooks.
02:23She got excited at their quality, and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne discovered each other's poems and selected poems from their collections for publication, choosing to do so under male pseudonyms.
02:35The poems were published in May of 1846.
02:39The book only initially sold two copies, but got positive reviews, which encouraged Charlotte.
02:45She began preparing novels for publication.
02:48Evidently, Charlotte Bronte became popular for her novels.
02:52Charlotte received two different proposals in 1839.
02:56One was from Henry Nussie, the brother of her friend Ellen, with whom she'd continued to correspond.
03:02The other was from an Irish minister.
03:04Charlotte turned them both down.
03:07In Brussels, she fell in love with the master of the school, though her affections and interests were not returned.
03:13Love inspired Charlotte for writing her novel, The Professor.
03:17In 1854, she married Arthur Nichols, a man who had once worked as an assistant to her father.
03:23But she died within a year of their marriage.
03:27Charlotte Bronte's second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847.
03:31It became the most successful book of the year.
03:35In 1849, Charlotte, visiting London, began to move in literary circles, making the acquaintance, for example, of Thackeray.
03:43Two years later, she attended his lectures about literature.
03:47Charlotte Bronte is one of the most famous Victorian women writers.
03:50Her best-known work, Jane Eyre, has the capacity of a fairy tale to transcend time,
03:57with its Cinderella story of an unwanted child who becomes a poor, plain governess,
04:02but ends up beating the odds by snaring the baronic hero, Mr. Rochester.
04:06As a provincial, Charlotte Bronte was behind the times and outside the loop of literary London.
04:13She had no idea quite how tawdry and naive her female Byronism would seem in 1847
04:19to the new progressive Victorian establishment,
04:22who had moved their focus from romantic individualism to social amelioration.
04:27And yet, for all doubts, Jane Eyre is a work of genius.
04:31Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is the novel that revolutionized the art of fiction.
04:37She explored issues like sexuality, feminism, and classism,
04:41issues that were regarded much ahead of her time.
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