"To you I am neither a man nor a woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me- the sole ground on which I accept your judgement." - Charlotte Bronte, to a critic (Oates, V)
             Charlotte Brontë's reputation may be explained in part by the astounding success of her first novel, Jane Eyre; it owes much also to the romantic appeal of her personal history, given prominence soon after her death by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's excellent biography. Of greater importance are her explorations of emotional repression and the feminine psyche introduced a new depth and intensity to the study of character and motive in fiction. Charlotte Brontë was not in any formal sense a proponent of women's rights, but in her writing, she speaks out strongly against the injustices suffered by women in a society that restricts their freedom of action and exploits their dependent status. Her protests grew out of her own experience, which provided much of the material for her fiction. She once insisted that "we only suffer reality to Suggest, never to dictate,"("Charlotte Bronte...", 9). Her novels include many characters and incidents recognizably drawn from her life, and her heroines have much in common with their creator.
             Brontë was born on April 21, 1816, at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Her father, Patrick Brontë, a native of County Down in Ireland, had risen above the poverty of his family to become an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, and in 1807 was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In 1812 he met, courted, and married Maria Branwell, a pious and educated young woman from Cornwall. Their life together was tragically brief; Maria bore six children in seven years, then died of cancer in 1821 at the age of thirty-eight. The early loss of their mother had a lasting effect on the children, particularly Charlotte; all her published novels are concerned in one w...