31 Mar 2022
Books, On This Day, Reading
31 March 2022 Cheryl

31 March 1855: Charlotte Brontë dies

Charlotte Bronte's death

On the day of Charlotte Brontë’s wedding in June 1854, her father, Patrick declared that he felt too ill to leave the house (he had been furious when Arthur Nicholls first proposed to her). Charlotte was instead given away by Margaret Wooler, the woman who had been her headmistress and then employer at Roe Head school. [1]

English novelist and poet, Charlotte Brontë died on 31 March 1855 four months into her first pregnancy.

Best known for her novel Jane Eyre, Brontë was born on 21 April 1816, the third of six children. Her mother died when she was five years old, and her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis while they were attending a school for daughters of clergymen.

Charlotte began writing at an early age and had written several works, including The Professor and Jane Eyre before she was 30. Her novels were initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

When she was 38 years old, in June 1854, Charlotte married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and the couple settled in Haworth. Charlotte soon became pregnant, but her health declined rapidly, and she suffered from severe nausea, becoming unable to eat. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, she was attacked by “sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness”. Today it is considered most likely that she died of the condition, hyperemesis gravidarum.

Charlotte Brontë died, with her unborn child, from dehydration and malnourishment, on 31 March 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday. She was buried in the family vault in the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Haworth. Charlotte’s father, Patrick Brontë outlived her by 6 years.