The eldest of the Brontë sisters, she was an English writer whose novels have become classics of English Literature. She was born in Thornton, England, in 1816. In 1824, a few years after her mother's death, Charlotte and three of her sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters School, an institution for the daughters of poor clergymen. The experience in that school was atrocious: the students were mistreated and the living conditions of the establishment were extremely poor. A typhus epidemic in the area killed two of her sisters, and after that tragedy, her father finally withdrew his daughters from school. Years later, Charlotte would immortalize that ordeal in her novel Jane Eyre. In 1847, she published her novel Jane Eyre, under the pse