the school, and remains at home for the next three years, instructing her sisters and assisting in running the household, as well as contributing prolifically to the Glass Town and Angrian sagas.
1835 July: Charlotte returns to Roe Head as a teacher. Emily accompanies her as a pupil. October: Emily returns home to Haworth and is replaced at Roe Head by the youngest Bront? sister, Anne.
1836 December: Charlotte writes to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, enclosing some of her poetry, and asking for his advice about a literary career. Southey replies (March 1837) that ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be.’
1838 December: Charlotte leaves her post at Miss Wooler’s school, now moved to Dewsbury Moor.
1839 March: Charlotte refuses a proposal of marriage from her friend Ellen’s brother, Henry Nussey. May–July: she is employed as a governess with the Sidgwick family at Stonegappe, near Lothersdale. In July, back at home, she receives and refuses another proposal of marriage, from a visiting young Irish curate, Mr Pryce.
1841 March–December: Charlotte is employed as a governess with the White family at Upperwood House, Rawdon.
1842 February: Charlotte and Emily go to Pensionnat Heger in Brussels to study languages. October: Aunt Elizabeth Branwell dies at Haworth. November: the sisters return home.
1843 January: Charlotte returns alone to Brussels as a pupil-teacher at Pensionnat Heger.
1844 January: Charlotte comes home. Plans to establish a school with her sisters at Haworth Parsonage come to nothing. She writes a series of passionate letters to Monsieur Heger, her teacher in Brussels. There is no record of any response.
1845 May: The Revd Arthur Bell Nicholls arrives at Haworth as curate. July: Branwell dismissed from his position as a tutor in disgrace. Autumn: Charlotte reads Emily’s poems and persuades her two sisters to compile a joint selection of their poetry for publication. Emily and Anne agree, on the condition that pseudonyms are used to protect their identity: the gender-ambiguous names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell are selected.
1846 April: Charlotte begins to try to interest publishers in the publication of ‘three distinct and unconnected tales’ – the sisters’ respective first novels: The Professor, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. May: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell is published at the sisters’ own expense. Although favourably reviewed by both the Athenaeum and the Critic, it sells only two copies. August: Charlotte accompanies her father to Manchester for a cataract operation. While there, she begins to write Jane Eyre.
1847 July: Thomas Newby agrees to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Charlotte sends The Professor to Smith, Elder & Co. who decline the novel but express interest in other work by its author. September: Smith, Elder agree to publish Jane Eyre. 19 October: Jane Eyre: An Autobiography ‘edited by Currer Bell’ is published and is an immediate success. December: Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell are published by Thomas Newby.
1848 June: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Acton Bell is published by Thomas New by July: Charlotte and Anne travel to London in order to confirm to their publishers that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell are three individual writers – not one, as rumours have suggested. The first volume of Charlotte’s Shirley is completed by the end of September. 24 September: Branwell dies, probably of tuberculosis aggravated by delirium tremens. 19 December: Emily dies of tuberculosis.
1849 28 May: Anne dies of tuberculosis at Scarborough. 26 October: Shirley. A Tale by Currer Bell published by Smith, Elder. November–December: Charlotte visits London as the guest of her publisher, George Smith, and meets William Makepeace Thackeray and Harriet Martineau for the first time.
1850 Charlotte pays visits to the Smiths in London, to the Kay-Shuttleworths in Windermere (where she meets Elizabeth Gaskell) and to Harriet Martineau in Ambleside. 10 December: Charlotte’s edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey with a ‘Biographical Notice’ of her sisters is published in one volume by Smith, Elder.
1851 Charlotte visits London, where she goes to the Great Exhibition and Thackeray’s lectures, and stays with Elizabeth Gaskell in Manchester. She begins Villette, completing the first volume by the end of March. April: Charlotte rejects an offer of marriage from James Taylor of Smith, Elder.
1852 November: Charlotte completes Villette, in spite of continuing ill health. December: Arthur Bell Nicholls proposes marriage, but Patrick Bront? is vehemently opposed.
1853 28 January: Villette by Currer Bell published by Smith, Elder.
1854 29 June: Charlotte marries Nicholls.
1855 31 March: Charlotte Bront? Nicholls dies at Haworth, aged 38, from complications during the