After a year and a half's residence at Roe Head, beloved and respected by all, laughed at occasionally by a few, but always to her face, Charlotte returned home to educate her sisters, to practise household work under the supervision of her somewhat exacting aunt, and to write long letters to her girl friends, Mary and Ellen--Mary, the Rose Yorke, and Ellen, the Caroline Helstone of "Shirley." Three years later she returned to Roe Head as a teacher, in order that her brother Branwell might be placed at the Royal Academy and her sister Emily at Roe Head. Emily Brontë, however, only remained three months at school, her place being taken there by her younger sister, Anne.
"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte, explaining the change. "Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in the livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many a dear delight; and not the least and best loved was liberty. Without it she perished. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. In this struggle her health was quickly broken. I felt in my heart that she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall."
Charlotte's own life at Miss Wooler's was a very happy one until her health failed, and she became dispirited, and a prey to religious despondency. During the summer holidays of 1836, all the members of the family were occupied with thoughts of literature. Charlotte wrote to Southey, and Branwell to Wordsworth, of their ambitions, and Southey replied that "literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation." To this Charlotte meekly replied: "I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print."
On the school being removed to Dewsbury Moor, Charlotte, whose health and spirits had been affected by the change, and Anne returned home. "I stayed at Dewsbury Moor," she said in a letter to Ellen Nussey, "as long as I was able; but at length I neither could nor dare stay any longer. My life and spirits had utterly failed me; so home I went, and the change at once roused and soothed me."
At this time Charlotte received an offer of marriage from a clergyman having a resemblance to St. John Rivers in "Jane Eyre"--a brother of her friend Ellen; but she refused him as she explains:
"I had a kindly leaning towards him as an amiable and well-disposed man. Yet I had not and could not have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband."
Teaching now seemed to the three sisters to be the only way of earning an independent livelihood, though they were not naturally fond of children. The hieroglyphics of childhood were an unknown language to them, for they had never been much with those younger than themselves; and they were not as yet qualified to take charge of advanced pupils. They knew but little French, and were not proficient in music. Still, Charlotte and Anne both took posts as governesses, and eventually formed a plan of starting a school on their own account, their housekeeping Aunt Branwell providing the necessary capital. To fit them for this work Charlotte and Emily entered, in February, 1842, the Héger Pensionnat, Brussels, and meantime Anne came home to Haworth from her governess life. The brother, Branwell, had now given up his idea of art, and was a clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railway.
In Brussels, Emily was homesick as ever, the suffering and conflict being heightened, in the words of Charlotte, "by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic, and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage house, and desolate Yorkshire hills." "We are completely isolated in the midst of numbers. Yet I think I am never unhappy; my present life is so delightful, so congenial to my own nature, compared with that of a governess," was Charlotte's further description.
The sisters were so successful with their study of French that Madame Héger proposed that both should stay another half year, Charlotte to teach English, and Emily music; but from Brussels the girls were brought hastily home by the illness and death of their aunt, who left to each of them independently a share of her savings--enough to enable them to make whatever alterations were needed to turn the parsonage into a school. Emily now stayed at home, and Charlotte (January, 1843) returned to Brussels to teach English to Belgian pupils, under a constant sense of solitude and depression, while she learned German. A year later she returned to Haworth, on receiving news of the distressing conduct of her brother Branwell and the rapid failure of her father's sight. On leaving Brussels, she took with her a diploma certifying that she was perfectly capable of teaching the French language, and her pupils showed for her, at parting, an affection which she observed with grateful surprise.