Barry, Herbert III2010-03-112010-03-112009978-1-55014-521-2http://hdl.handle.net/10315/3616The first name is a distinctive personal label. It usually distinguishes oneself from other family members and from most other people. In common with other novelists, Charlotte Bronte chose for many fictional characters the first name of an actual person who was important to her. Attributes of the fictional character might provide useful information on feelings of the author toward the actual namesake. An unusual attribute of the four novels by Charlotte Bronte is that the author revealed an actual person who was the model for more than two dozen fictional characters. Experiences of the author are reproduced by some of the fictional characters and by other aspects of the four successive novels, <The Professor>, <Jane Eyre>, <Shirley>, and <Villette>. In each novel, one of the most important characters partially resembles Charlotte Bronte. A very minor character named Charlotte, in <Villette>, is the only fictional namesake of the author. Most of the actions and events in <The Professor> and in <Villette> are in Brussels, Belgium. In that foreign city, Charlotte Bronte was a student and then teacher at a school for young ladies. She fell in love with a teacher who was the husband of the school’s director.enThe following articles are © 2009 with the individual authors. They are made available free of charge from this page as a service to the community under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works license version 3.0. For full details go to http://creativecommons.org.licenses/ny-nd.3.0Charlotte BronteNames in LiteratureNames in Charlotte Bronte's NovelsArticle