Family

   Charlotte's mother, Maria Branwell Brontë, died when her daughter was only five years old. Born to a prosperous tea merchant and grocer, Maria Branwell was raised in Penzance, Cornwall, married Patrick Brontë in 1812, bore six children in seven years—Maria (1813), Elizabeth (1815), Charlotte (1816), Patrick Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820)—and died of cancer at the age of thirty-eight. Though the loss of their mother certainly made a difference in the lives of all the Brontë children, the younger ones—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—seem not to have been seriously affected by her death. A remarkably observant child with a good memory, Charlotte nevertheless remembered little of her mother; when, as an adult, she read letters that her mother had written to her father during their courtship, she wrote to a friend on 16 February 1850, "I wish She had lived and that I had known her." 

During Maria Brontë's illness her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Penzance to care for the family temporarily and, because Patrick Brontë's attempts to remarry after his wife's death were unsuccessful, she stayed until she died in 1842. "Aunt Branwell" has often been characterized as a gloomy and rigid Methodist who cast a pall of moral reproval over the lives of the little Brontës, but Charlotte's close friend Ellen Nussey remembered her in an 1871 memoir as "lively and intelligent" and capable of arguing "without fear" in conversations with her brother-in-law. She seems to have had more influence over Anne, who was still an infant when her aunt arrived in Haworth, than over the older children, who had considerable freedom in choosing their activities. Often left to their own devices, they played on the wide expanse of moors that surrounded their parsonage home; they also read voraciously and engaged in the imaginative play that was to develop quickly into literary inventiveness. 

Charlotte's eldest sister, Maria, appears to have been especially influential in the creative development of her siblings. Unusually bright and mature for a nine-year-old, Maria became somewhat of a companion to her father after her mother's death, reading to him and her siblings from the pages of Blackwood's Magazine. She also directed little dramas through which the children early developed skill at speaking in the voices of imagined characters. Under the tutelage of her father and at the encouragement of Maria, Charlotte, like her younger brother and sisters, was attracted to the literary life at an early age.