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.

Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 in Yorkshire, the third of six children in a parsonage on the edge of the moors. She and her sisters Emily and Anne wrote obsessively from childhood. When they finally published, all three used male pseudonyms because, as Charlotte put it, they had noticed that authoresses were liable to be looked on with prejudice.

Jane Eyre, published in 1847, was a sensation and a provocation — a woman insisting on her own moral authority, her own happiness, her own refusal to be managed. Readers loved it. Critics called it dangerous. Both were right.

Charlotte outlived all five of her siblings. She died in 1855 at thirty-eight, barely a year into her marriage.