Charlotte Brontë was born in Yorkshire in 1816. She was the third of six children, two years older than Emily, and four years older than Anne. After schooling she worked as a governess, and then taught in Brussels. In 1846 she returned to England and published poems by her and her younger sisters, under the pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. In 1847 she completed Jane Eyre, which was published to considerable acclaim. Both her younger sisters also wrote novels. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne penned Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte married in 1854 and died in 1855.

Emily Brontë was born in 1818, the daughter of a curate. She was the most enigmatic of the three famous novelist sisters. Losing her mother very early in her life and following her elder sister Charlotte to school, she found life away from the Haworth parsonage extremely hard. Her time as a teacher at Law Hill School near Halifax was similarly trying. Homesickness drew her back to the moors and the life of a reclusive author. It was there, in 1848, that she died of tuberculosis just months after her brother Branwell. Few of her papers survive and her reputation is based on a few surviving poems and one novel, Wuthering Heights.