Today in Labor History April 21, 1816: Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet, was born. After her mother died of cancer, in 1821, her father sent the five Brontë sisters to Clergy Daughters' School, where the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis. The disease killed them both in 1825. Charlotte always said that the terrible conditions in that school stunted her physical development and caused her lifelong health problems. Charlotte wrote her first poem in 1829, at the age of 13. She would go on to write 200 more poems. In 1836, she asked Poet Laureate Robert Southey for encouragement as a writer. He replied, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and ought not to be.” Because of this advice, she chose to publish under the gender-neutral name of Currer Bell, to avoid prejudice. She published a book of poetry in 1846, and her most famous novel, “Jane Eyre,” in 1847. In Jane Eyre, she uses the Clergy Daughters' School as the model for the school attended by her eponymous protagonist, Jane Eyre. Bronte died in 1855, most likely from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy.
As young adults, my brothers and I thoroughly looted our parent’s library. I still have many of those books, with their dog-eared pages and faint whiff of mildew. I think of them as comfort food for the mind. I picked up some great Melville that way, and Jack London, too. But my favorite score was a matching set of Jayne Eyre and Wuthering Heights that I recently found in their library, after my father died. My mom told me that they had belonged to her mother, who passed them down to her. And now she was passing them down to me. Great literature, of course, but they also contain beautiful artwork. And provenance, with my grandmother’s name printed on the inside cover.
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