'Let my efforts be known by their results'

 

“I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.” – Charlotte Bronte

 

Bronte, who lived to just age 39 before dying of typhus, was born on this date in 1816.  The oldest of 3 Bronte sisters who survived into adulthood (2 other sisters died of tuberculosis), she wrote novels that are still considered classics of English literature. 

 

Bronte gave us such statements as “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.”  And “The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept, in silence sealed; the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, whose charms were broken if revealed.”  She plowed new writing ground by combining naturalism with gothic melodrama.

  

A surrogate “mother” to 3 younger siblings (after their mother died following the birth of sister Anne) she began writing with sisters Emily and Anne, co-publishing a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bell – Charlotte as Currer; Emily as Ellis; and Anne as Acton.

 

While their poems did not succeed, the three women’s subsequent novels – Jane Eyre from Charlotte; Wuthering Heights from Emily; and Agnes Grey from Anne – were wildly successful and led to their revealing their real names to the writing world. 

 

Happy to just “produce” and not worry about being recognized for it, she noted, “If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”