Charlotte Brontë
1816–1855 · England
she published as a man and outlived them all
Charlotte Brontë lost her mother at five and two elder sisters at nine, both after an outbreak of illness at a charity boarding school she later rebuilt, wholesale and furiously, as Lowood in Jane Eyre. The surviving children invented enormous imaginary kingdoms and wrote them into hand-sewn booklets an inch high, in script so small it needed a magnifying glass.
In 1842 she went to Brussels to study, and fell in love with Constantin Heger, a married schoolmaster who did not answer her letters. He kept them; his wife had torn some up, and he had sewn them back together. Villette came out of it.
In 1846 the three sisters published a book of poems as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It sold two copies. Jane Eyre, the following year, sold everything, and the identity of Currer Bell became the literary question of the season.
Then, between September 1848 and May 1849, her brother Branwell, her sister Emily and her sister Anne all died. She finished Shirley alone in the house where she had once had a family of six. She married in 1854, and died the following spring, pregnant, at thirty-eight.