'Let my efforts be known by their results'

 

“I'm just going to write because Icannot help it.” – Charlotte Bronte

 

Bronte, who lived to just age 39before dying of typhus, was born on this date in 1816.  The oldest of3 Bronte sisters who survived into adulthood (2 other sisters died oftuberculosis), she wrote novels that are still considered classics of Englishliterature. 

 

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

 

 

A surrogate “mother” to 3 youngersiblings (after their mother died following the birth of sister Anne) she beganwriting with sisters Emily and Anne, co-publishing a book of poetry under thepseudonym 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; WutheringHeights from Emily; and Agnes Grey from Anne – werewildly successful and led to their revealing their real names to the writingworld. 

 

Happy to just “produce” and notworry about being recognized for it, she noted, “If I could I would always workin silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”