Charlotte Brontë

She published under a man's name because the world wouldn't have taken her seriously otherwise. The world took her seriously anyway — and then spent the next century arguing about whether it should have been surprised.

• Born: April 21, 1816, Thornton, Yorkshire, England
• Died: March 31, 1855, Haworth, Yorkshire (age 38, likely tuberculosis or hyperemesis gravidarum)
• Era: Victorian; Gothic fiction; social realism
• Major works: Jane Eyre (1847, as Currer Bell), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853)
• Pen name: Currer Bell — chosen with sisters Emily (Ellis Bell) and Anne (Acton Bell) because, as Charlotte wrote, they "noticed that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice"

Charlotte Brontë was born in a Yorkshire parsonage on the edge of the moors, third of six children. She and her sisters wrote obsessively from childhood — elaborate fantasy worlds, serial stories, notebooks filled with small, dense handwriting that looked designed to keep adults from reading it. The three sisters who survived to adulthood all became novelists. All three published under male pseudonyms. The question of whether that decision protected them or diminished them is still being argued.

Jane Eyre, published in 1847, was a provocation as much as a novel: a woman with no money, no beauty by conventional standards, and no social position insisting on her own moral authority, her own judgment, and her own refusal to be managed. The novel was a sensation. Critics called it dangerous. Some readers suspected the author was actually a man because no woman, they reasoned, would write with that much anger. Both responses confirmed exactly what Charlotte had been writing about.

She outlived all five of her siblings — including Emily, who died in December 1848, and Anne, who died the following May. She kept writing. Shirley was published in October 1849, during a period of grief that would have silenced most people. Villette, published in 1853, draws on her years as a teacher in Brussels and is arguably her most psychologically complex novel — darker than Jane Eyre and less willing to offer comfort.

She died in 1855 at thirty-eight, barely a year into her marriage to her father's curate. Whether the cause was tuberculosis or complications of pregnancy is still debated by medical historians. She had spent her adult life insisting that women's inner lives were as real, as turbulent, and as worth writing about as any man's. The argument took.

For the readers who know that moral authority has nothing to do with permission — and that some truths are worth the anger they require.