Queer Places:
Brontë Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth, Haworth, Keighley BD22 8DR, UK
St Michael & All Angels, 125 Main St, Haworth, Keighley BD22 8DR, UK

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/CBRichmond.pngCharlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. Between 1831 and 1832, Brontë continued her education at Roe Head in Mirfield, where she met her lifelong friends and correspondents Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.[2] In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette the heroine rejects female friendship but also never marries. In Shirley (1849), the double wedding that concludes the novel sustains the preexisting bond between brides who begin as friends and end as sisters-in-law.

She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. She left the year after to teach her sisters, Emily and Anne, at home, returning in 1835 as a governess. In 1839 she undertook the role as governess for the Sidgwick family, but left after a few months to return to Haworth where the sisters opened a school, but failed to attract pupils. Instead they turned to writing and they each first published in 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Her first novel The Professor was rejected by publishers, her second novel Jane Eyre was published in 1847. The sisters admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in 1848, and by the following year were celebrated in London literary circles.

For Charlotte Bronte and her lifelong romantic friend, Ellen Nussey, a joint home remained an unattainable dream. The pair had met at school in 1832, and continued a close and passionate friendship throughout their lives, visiting each other frequently after leaving school, sharing a bed when together and exchanging letters complaining about their separation when apart. In the years after leaving schhol, the idea of living together was frequently discussed by the women. In 1836, Bronte wrote to Nussey: Ellen, I wish I could live with you always. I begin to cling to your more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage, and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on to Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness. Bronte refused at least three proposals of marriage in her youth, while Ellen Nussey resisted marriage throughout her life. When Ellen Nussey's brother, Henry, proposed to Charlotte in 1839, she wrote to Ellen that she had been tempted to accept in order to be able to live with Ellen, but ultimately she could not agree.


St Michael & All Angel's Church, Hathersage

In 1845, Charlotte Bronte stayed at the Hathersage vicarage, visiting her friend Ellen Nussey, whose brother was the vicar, while she was writing Jane Eyre. Many of the locations mentioned in her novel match locations in Hathersage, the name Eyre being that of a local gentry family. Her Thornfield Hall is widely accepted to be North Lees Hall situated on the outskirts of Hathersage.

Before the publication of Villette, Brontë received an expected proposal of marriage from Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, who had long been in love with her.[30] She initially turned down his proposal and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls's poor financial status. Elizabeth Gaskell, who believed that marriage provided "clear and defined duties" that were beneficial for a woman,[31] encouraged Brontë to consider the positive aspects of such a union and tried to use her contacts to engineer an improvement in Nicholls's finances. By January 1854 Brontë had accepted his proposal. They gained the approval of her father by April and married in June.[32] Her father Patrick had intended to give Charlotte away, but at the last minute decided he could not, and Charlotte had to make her way to the church without him.[33] The married couple took their honeymoon in Banagher, County Offaly, Ireland.[34] Letters written after the marriage suggest that she regretted the step and found Nicholls' restrictions on her time and friendships difficult to bear. Nicholls and Nussey were not on friendly terms and he prevented Charlotte and Ellen from meeting on several occasion before Bronte's sudden death.

Charlotte Brontë was cautious in her letters to Ellen Nussey, though the omissions made by Elizabeth Gaskell in her biography (‘You tantalize me to death with talking of conversations by the fireside and between the blankets’) and the concerns of Charlotte’s husband (‘Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept, they are dangerous as Lucifer matches’) show that no allusion could be too obscure.

Brontë became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and, according to Gaskell, she was attacked by "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness".[35] She died, with her unborn child, on 31 March 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday. Her death certificate gives the cause of death as tuberculosis, but biographers including Claire Harman suggest that she died from dehydration and malnourishment due to vomiting caused by severe morning sickness or hyperemesis gravidarum. Charlotte Brontë was buried in the family vault in the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Haworth.

The Professor, the first novel Brontë had written, was published posthumously in 1857. The fragment of a new novel she had been writing in her last years has been twice completed by recent authors, the more famous version being Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë by Clare Boylan in 2003. Most of her writings about the imaginary country Angria have also been published since her death. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.[36]

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