Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.

Charlotte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire in 1816, the third of six children, to Maria (née Branwell) and her husband Patrick Brontë (formerly surnamed Brunty or Prunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman. In 1820 her family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth, where her father had been appointed Perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church. Her mother died of cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and a son Branwell to be taken care of by her sister, Elizabeth Branwell.

In August 1824, Patrick Brontë sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria and Elizabeth to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Charlotte maintained the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who died of tuberculosis in June 1825. After the deaths of her older sisters, her father removed Charlotte and Emily from the school. Charlotte used the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

At home in Haworth Parsonage Charlotte acted as "the motherly friend and guardian of her younger sisters". She and her surviving siblings — Branwell, Emily, and Anne – created their own literary fictional worlds and began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms. Charlotte and Branwell wrote Byronic stories about their imagined country, "Angria", and Emily and Anne wrote articles and poems about "Gondal". The sagas they created were elaborate and convoluted (and exist in partial manuscripts) and provided them with an obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence which prepared them for literary vocations in adulthood.

Between 1831 and 1832 Charlotte continued her education at Roe Head in Mirfield, where she met her lifelong friends and correspondents, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. In 1833 she wrote a novella, The Green Dwarf, using the name Wellesley. Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. In 1839 she took up the first of many positions as governess to families in Yorkshire, a career she pursued until 1841. Politically a Tory, she preached tolerance rather than revolution. She held high moral principles and, despite her shyness, was prepared to argue for her beliefs.

In 1842 Charlotte and Emily travelled to Brussels to enrol at the boarding school run by Constantin Heger (1809–96) and his wife Claire Zoé Parent Heger (1804–87). In return for board and tuition, Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music. Their time at the school was cut short when Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt who joined the family to look after the children after the death of their mother, died of internal obstruction in October 1842. Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843 to take up a teaching post at the school. Her second stay was not happy; she was lonely, homesick and deeply attached to Constantin Heger. She returned to Haworth in January 1844 and used the time spent in Brussels as the inspiration for some experiences in The Professor and Villette.

In May 1846 Charlotte, Emily and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poetry under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The pseudonyms veiled the sisters' gender whilst preserving their initials, thus Charlotte was "Currer Bell". "Bell" was the middle name of Haworth's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom Charlotte married.

Although only two copies of the collection of poetry were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their noms de plume when sending manuscripts to potential publishers.

Following the success of Jane Eyre, in 1848 Charlotte began work on the manuscript of her second novel, Shirley. The manuscript was partially completed when the Brontë household suffered a tragic series of events, the deaths of three family members within eight months. In September 1848, Branwell, died of chronic bronchitis and marasmus exacerbated by heavy drinking, although Charlotte believed his death was due to tuberculosis. Branwell was a suspected "opium eater", a laudanum addict. Emily became seriously ill shortly after Branwell's funeral, and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1848. Anne died of the same disease in May 1849. Charlotte was unable to write at this time.

After Anne's death Charlotte resumed writing as a way of dealing with her grief, and Shirley which deals with themes of industrial unrest and the role of women in society was published in October 1849. Unlike Jane Eyre, which is written from the main character's first-person perspective, Shirley is written in the third person and lacks the emotional immediacy of her first novel, and reviewers found it less shocking.

In view of her novels' success, particularly Jane Eyre, Charlotte was persuaded by her publisher to visit London occasionally, where she revealed her true identity and began to move in more exalted social circles, becoming friends with Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, and acquainted with William Makepeace Thackeray and G. H. Lewes. She never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time as she did not want to leave her ageing father.

Before the publication of Villette, Charlotte received a proposal of marriage from Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate who had long been in love with her. She initially turned down his proposal, and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls' poor financial status. Elizabeth Gaskell, who believed marriage provided 'clear and defined duties' that were beneficial for a woman, encouraged Charlotte to consider the positive aspects of such a union, and tried to use her contacts to engineer an improvement in Nicholls' financial situation. Charlotte meanwhile was increasingly attracted to the intense attachment displayed by Nicholls, and by January 1854 had accepted his proposal. They gained the approval of her father by April, and married in June. They took their honeymoon in Ireland.

Charlotte became pregnant soon after the marriage but her health declined rapidly and according to Gaskell, she was attacked by "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness." Charlotte died with her unborn child on 31 March 1855, aged 38. Her death certificate gives the cause of death as phthisis, but many biographers suggest she may have died from dehydration and malnourishment, caused by excessive vomiting from severe morning sickness or hyperemesis gravidarum. There is evidence to suggest that Charlotte died from typhus which she may have caught from Tabitha Ackroyd, the Brontë household's oldest servant, who died shortly before her. Charlotte was interred in the family vault in the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Haworth.

Charlotte's first-written novel, The Professor, was published posthumously in 1857. The fragment of a new novel she had been working on in her last years has been twice completed by recent authors, the more famous version being Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë by Clare Boylan in 2003. Much Angria material has appeared in published form since the author's death.