Who better to sit with for an hour or a day than Charlotte Brontë?
Charlotte Brontë, known publicly in her lifetime by the pen name Currer Bell, was the most immediately successful of the Brontë authors, a cohort that included her two sisters, Anne and Emily, but which also extended to their father, Patrick.
Brontë wrote two permanent novels, Jane Eyre and Villette; she outlived her siblings, managing their literary careers, and she died of &#8220;the family malady,&#8221; Tuberculosis, some nine months after having married one of her father&#8217;s curates.
Brontë&#8217;s writing, often evoking a blanket grayness punctuated with otherworldly color, develops the psychology of the individual in a kind of negative romanticism, submerging into the depths of personal isolation girded by the biblical trappings of a devout upbringing, the psalms and the gospels, and the sense of revelatory doom; all this, made light in musical, barbed, smoothly-flowing prose.