Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë lost her mother young and, at eight, two older sisters to tuberculosis after a brutal charity school she later reimagined as Jane Eyre's Lowood. She worked as a governess and teacher, hating both, before she and her sisters Emily and Anne pooled savings to self-publish poetry under male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell) that sold almost nothing.

Jane Eyre (1847), published under the same disguise, became an instant sensation and moral controversy for its heroine's plain-spoken defiance. Within little more than a year she buried her brother Branwell and both surviving sisters to tuberculosis, and finished Villette largely alone. She married her father's curate in 1854 and died the following year, during a difficult pregnancy, at thirty-eight.