Charlotte Brontë  (April 21, 1816 – March 31, 1855) was the eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters  whose novels became staples of English literature. She was the daughter of an Irish Anglican clergyman in the Yorkshire village of Haworth and was looked after by an aunt after her mother died when she was five.  She and her four sisters were sent to Clergy Daughters School, where the poor conditions affected her health and hastened the deaths of her two older sisters. She and her sisters Ann and Emily were removed from the school and returned home, where they and their brother Branwell spent long hours inventing fictional worlds and chronicling the lives of their imaginary inhabitants.  She had a number of positions as a governess and teacher before Jane Eyre, her second novel, was published to immediate success in 1847.  She was at work on her follow up when her three remaining siblings died of tuberculosis in an eight month period in 1948 and 1849.  She managed to finish the book, Shirley, and another, Villette, before her health declined during the pregnancy following her marriage to Arthur Bell Nichols, culminating in her death in 1855.