Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and the eldest of the three literary Brontë sisters. Her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), published under the pseudonym Currer Bell, was an immediate sensation — its passionate, first-person voice and its insistence on the interior life of a plain, poor woman were genuinely new in English fiction. She also wrote Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, drawing heavily on her experiences as a governess and her years studying in Brussels.
