10 facts you probably didn’t know about Charlotte Brontë

1. Early fans of Jane Eyre included Queen Victoria, who referred to it as "that intensely interesting novel," and Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray, who said he had "lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it."

2. Charlotte's sisters objected to Jane Eyre's plainness, arguing that the public would not embrace an unattractive heroine. Charlotte adamantly refused to make Jane beautiful.

3. Two years after her death in 1855, Charlotte's friend Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography about her called Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell was commissioned to write the book by Charlotte's father, Patrick, and it became a bestseller.

4. From childhood into their teen years, the Brontë siblings invented an elaborate world inspired by Branwell's toy soldiers. They established countries (Charlotte and Branwell called theirs Angria) and wrote tiny books and magazines for the soldiers.

5. Some of the toy soldiers' tiny manuscripts still exist today. La Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits - a Paris museum - purchased a booklet entitled Young Men's Magazines for £690,850 in 2011. Written by Brontë at the age of 14, it consists of over 4,000 words written on 19 pages.

6. Charlotte had few memories of her mother Maria, who died when she was only five years old. One of Charlotte's memories is walking past a door and seeing her mother playing with her then baby brother, Branwell.

7. Brontë was proposed to by four different men and rejected all of them. She later changed her mind about her final suitor, her father's colleague Arthur Nicholls, and married him.

8. Brontë died eight months after her wedding, at the age of 38. Scholar Claire Harman believes she was pregnant and afflicted with a severe form of morning sickness now known as hyperemesis gravidarum. Kate Middleton also suffered from the rare condition during her pregnancies.

9. Before publishing Jane Eyre, Charlotte was a teacher and governess. She hated the career and treated her students with disdain.

10. Charlotte spent most of her life living at her father's parsonage on a remote English moor near Haworth, which she described as "a strange uncivilised little place." She and her siblings wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in the dining room within the same year.