Mainly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne's death, she is less known than her sisters Charlotte, author of four novels including Jane Eyre, and Emily, author of Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version.

She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.

Charlotte later used the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

Title page of the first edition of Jane Eyre

Charlotte responded by finishing and sending a second manuscript in August 1847, and six weeks later Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, was published.

Charlotte believed that art was most convincing when based on personal experience ; in Jane Eyre she transformed this experience into a novel with universal appeal.

However sales of Jane Eyre continued to be strong, and may have increased as a result of the novel developing a reputation as an ' improper ' book.

Following the success of Jane Eyre, in 1848 Charlotte began work on the manuscript of her second novel, Shirley.

Unlike Jane Eyre, which is written from the first-person perspective of the main character, Shirley is written in the third-person and lacks the emotional immediacy of Jane Eyre, and reviewers found it less shocking.

In view of the success of her novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Charlotte was persuaded by her publisher to visit London occasionally, where she revealed her true identity and began to move in a more exalted social circle, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, and acquainted with William Makepeace Thackeray and G. H. Lewes.

Villette marked Charlotte's return to writing from a first-person perspective ( that of Lucy Snowe ), a technique she used successfully in Jane Eyre.

Another similarity to Jane Eyre was the use of aspects from her own life as inspiration for fictional events, in particular reworking the time she spent at the pensionnat in Brussels into Lucy teaching at the boarding school, and falling in love with Constantin Heger into Lucy falling in love with ' Paul Emanuel '.

* Jane Eyre, published 1847

* The Professor, written before Jane Eyre, submitted at first along with Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, then separately, and rejected in either form by many publishing houses, published posthumously in 1857

* Charlotte's Web: A Hypertext on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

After the death of their mother in 1821, when Emily was three years old, the older sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters ' School at Cowan Bridge, where they encountered abuse and privations later described by Charlotte in Jane Eyre.

In Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre, Mr Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ( 1847 ) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff while Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre ( 1847 ) adds The Madwoman in the Attic ( Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1979 ) to the cast of Gothic fiction.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy are both examples of female protagonists in such a role.

Many modern writers of horror ( or indeed other types of fiction ) exhibit considerable Gothic sensibilities — examples include the works of Anne Rice, as well as some of the sensationalist works of Stephen King The Romantic strand of Gothic was taken up in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca ( 1938 ) which is in many respects a reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.