1816–1855 · English novelist and poet, published as Currer Bell
Charlotte Brontë was the eldest surviving of the three Brontë sisters and the author of Jane Eyre (1847), which she published under the male pen name Currer Bell. She had been sent as a child to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth contracted the illness that killed them — the experience she reworked as Lowood, the school where this line is spoken. She outlived all five of her siblings and died in 1855, at 38.