What first must burn inside

 

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

 

Born in England on this date in 1816, Bronte lived to just age 39 before dying of typhus during pregnancy.  The oldest of 3 Bronte sisters who survived into adulthood (2 others died of tuberculosis), she and her surviving sisters Emily and Anne each wrote novels that are considered classics of English literature. 

Her writing career formally began when she, Emily and Anne co-published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bell – Charlotte as Currer; Emily as Ellis; and Anne as Acton.  Their poems did not succeed but 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.   With an innovative style that combined naturalism with gothic melodrama, Charlotte’s writing especially plowed new ground.

Her remarkable lyrical style 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.”

“What you want to ignite in others,” she said of her hopes as a writer, “must first burn inside yourself.”