`A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid`, is how George Lewes described Charlotte Brontë to George Eliot. She was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Charlotte was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who had moved with his family to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820. The landscape around the parsonage, the lonely rolling moors and wild wind, influences all the Brontë sisters deeply.p

Charlotte, the oldest of the three Brontë sisters, together with Emily and Anne formed part of a great literary Irish family. 

Formal education was discontinued when two of the other sisters in the family died from Tuberculosis. 

Their father, a clergyman, undertook their education but the sisters seemd largely to have educated themselves by reading extensively and writing stories from an early age. 

Charlotte became a governess and began to write to earn money. Although her first novel, The Professor, was never published in her life time (Posthumous publication circa September 22nd 1856) Jane Eyre was and was immediately sucessful and has since been regarded as one of the most famous novels in the English Language. Vilette was based on her experiences in Brussels.

Charlotte`s writings were considered to be unconventional and not appropriate for a women writers of that time. She wrote under the pseudonym of Currer Bell.

Charlotte outlived her sisters. She eventually died while pregnant, within a few months of her marriage.

(Bibliography taken in part from LiteratureClassics.com )