Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and it sold immediately. Its first-person voice — a plain, poor, unimpressive narrator who insists on her own worth anyway — was new enough that reviewers found it coarse. She outlived her two novelist sisters and her brother, all of whom died within nine months of each other, and died herself during her first pregnancy. Her best-known declaration is usually reproduced with a colon where she wrote a semicolon, and cut short of its final clause. The full sentences are given here, with chapter numbers.