Seven pupils died in a typhus epidemic that swept the school and all four of the Brontë girls became very ill - Maria and Elizabeth dying of tuberculosis in 1825. The school was unheated and the pupils slept two to a bed for warmth.

They were regularly deprived of food, beaten by teachers and humiliated for the slightest error.

The school was a horrific experience for the girls and conditions were appalling. In August 1824 Charlotte, along with her sisters Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, was sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, a new school for the daughters of poor clergyman (which she would describe as Lowood School in Jane Eyre). Maria Branwell Brontë died from what was thought to be cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of her spinster sister Elizabeth Branwell, who moved to Yorkshire to help the family. This is where the Brontë children would spend most of their lives. In April 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate. See also Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë.Ĭharlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the third of six children, to Patrick Brontë (formerly 'Patrick Brunty'), an Irish Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Maria Branwell. The affection which grows between Mrs Chalfont and Martina out of their mutual distress illumines this story, and Emma herself, with her inexplicable motives, her incomprehensible anger and her darkness of soul, develops into a character of whom Charlotte Brontë would have been proud.Ĭharlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest out of the three famous Brontë sisters whose novels have become standards of English literature. The wanton havoc wrought by Emma in the life of Mrs Chalfont, the narrator, is not the only proof of her ruthlessness she plays a part, too, in the sufferings of the abandoned child, Martina. The characters grow in vitality and complexity while remaining true in spirit, tone and style to the original conception. Her lively powers of invention have worked the unfolding mystery of Charlotte Brontë's two opening chapters into an exciting and poignant story.

A child spiritually oppressed, a school run on shallow and mercenary principles, a brutish schoolmistress, a quiet observer of the injustice and cruelty-it contained the same preoccupations which elsewhere had called forth her most passionate and dramatic writing.Īnother Lady has now at last fulfilled the promise of that novel. In the very last month before her death at the age of thirty-nine, at the height of her powers, Charlotte Brontë set the scene of a new novel called Emma.

Emma by charlotte brontë