Charlotte Charlotte Bronte’s 200th birthday marked in UK

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte, whose intense and passionate vision of rural life in Jane Eyre has haunted generations of readers, was being marked in Britain on Thursday.

Fans are hosting a birthday party in the house in northern England where Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne grew up and wrote their books. The anniversary highlights the enduring global popularity of the Brontes, whose works are seen as among the most important ever written by female authors.

A wreath will be laid for Bronte in Westminster Abbey on Friday and a ballet version of Jane Eyre is opening in May, while the National Portrait Gallery is hosting an exhibition in her honour.

The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, a remote village on the edge of moors in Yorkshire, draws tens of thousands of visitors from around the world each year, while the sisters’ books are staples of British bookshops and school curriculums. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were a clergyman’s daughters who wrote for pleasure and dreamt of becoming published authors but feared they would not be taken seriously because they were women.

They therefore adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell when they sent Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to publishers in the 1840s.