The Brontë sisters were women of their class and time—educated, impoverished, likely destined to spinsterhood—although with a twist. Their childhood was sui generis. Motherless since they were very young, the Brontës enjoyed the benign neglect of their busy father and made the most of their freedom to develop elaborate fantasy worlds. They read everything they could; spent long afternoons on the moor that began at their back door; invented exotic kingdoms with voluminous histories and political intrigues; put on plays only they would see; issued magazines only they would read; and sewed novels and poems into miniature books written in script so tiny that no adult in the household could decipher them. Nonetheless, since their aging father occupied his parsonage on the sufferance of a quarrelsome congregation, they lacked security and had to find a profession. That could only mean, for the Brontës, becoming governesses or teachers of the children of the gentry.

Norton

Charlotte’s first teaching job lasted three years. She deemed the work “wretched bondage” and the students “fat-headed oafs.” Next, she and Anne tried governessing. During Charlotte’s first of two governess stints (it lasted two months), she discovered to her horror that she had been reduced to a glorified nanny. “I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill,” Charlotte wrote Emily. Anne managed to hold her second governess post for five years. The misanthropic Emily worked briefly as a teacher in a girls’ school, where she once told her students that she preferred the school dog to them.

Charlotte and Emily both taught for the second time at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, where they were also students. Emily quit after a couple of months and moved back into the parsonage, becoming the family housekeeper. Charlotte hung on a year longer, mostly because she fell in love with her teacher and colleague Constantin Heger. A brilliant, charismatic professor, he was the first male non-Brontë to recognize their powers and treat them as intellectual peers.

He was also married—to Charlotte’s employer, the directrice of the school. Heger lavished a flirtatious, continental affection on his star female pupils, especially Charlotte, something “the stiff-necked Brontës may well have found surprising,” writes Claire Harman, who homes in on this interlude in Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart. Charlotte, she says, was “love-starved,” and surely overwhelmed by Heger’s intense interest in her. Whatever passed between her and him probably “took place largely in her own head.” But Heger’s wife noticed Charlotte’s “heightened state of excitement” and began to monitor her closely. Heger grew distant. After many months of this, Charlotte quit. Back home, she toyed with the idea of starting a school in the parsonage with Emily and Anne, but poured her energy into increasingly desperate letters to Heger. He replied intermittently and formally.

Pegasus

The Brontë school never opened. Instead, Charlotte wrote the first novel she tried to publish, The Professor, a veiled (and flawed) account of her sojourn in Brussels that didn’t appear in print during her lifetime. But in her next novel, Jane Eyre, and her last, Villette, she put her work history to spectacular use. She expressed her outrage at the degraded status of governesses and teachers. She condemned the isolation and vulnerability of a woman who goes into the world to make her own way. She let loose her feelings for Heger, electromagnetizing the novels with sensuality.