Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was an English novelist, the eldest of the three writing Brontë sisters and the only one to live past thirty-eight. Writing as Currer Bell, she published Jane Eyre in 1847 to immediate success, following it with Shirley and Villette, both drawing on her work as a teacher and governess. Her first-person narration of a plain, self-possessed heroine who insists on her own moral standing was widely felt at the time to be something new in English fiction.