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AuthorsCharlotte Brontë’s death
I’ve been reading Charlotte Brontë recently and was just googling a bit about her. I hadn’t realised she had died from pregnancy complications shortly after marrying in her late thirties. It’s made me feel sad so I just wanted to share on here I guess.
Yes and I think she finally married out of loneliness after losing all her siblings. She'd already turned her future husband down once, though apparently she caught him crying afterwards and was moved more towards him, as she hadn't realized his feelings were that deep.
I hope she had a little happiness in the marriage at least.
She also likely got TB working as a governess/teacher in overcrowded schools early on in her life. I look up to her as things haven’t changed much in education since then. I have been seriously ill from exposure to constant respiratory illness/infection at work. I think it’s particularly tragic she stood independently for so long, only to be taken out by pregnancy related complications. Absolutely tragic.
I always thought that was sad. She put off being married until she was "too old" by their standards (not being married in your early 20s had you labeled on the shelf, so at 38 she was a very unique case of a first-time bride) and did so much great work only to eventually die from the same thing so many of her friends and family had...childbirth.
I hope she really loved her husband. She turned him down once but apparently grew to like him later. I feel like we were robbed of more of her work.
All six of the children, and their mother, died young. Absolutely terrible. So much grief in that family.
Bronte and her sisters overcame a lot, they all were really sick growing up at their boarding school which Jane Eyre experienced too. It looks like Masterpiece did a series on them. I should watch it. I have to say, the one Lucy Worsley did for Jane Austen was incredibly interesting. I also wish i had read Emilie's Wuthering Heights when i was younger. By the time i read it, i couldn't relate well to the impetuousness of the characters anymore.
Yeah, that's always saddened me. Wikipedia has a pretty good bio of her that talks about that.
I'll see your Charlotte Brontë's death from pregnancy complications and raise you Mary Wollstonecraft's death from pregnancy complications - also in her late thirties. That one has always stung me the most for its cruel irony.
I see Bronte and raise you Emilie du Chatelet. The 18th-century French scientist who raced against time to finish her work because she was pregnant and feared dying in childbirth before she could finish. And she was right.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030751-000-emilie-du-chatelet-the-woman-who-popularised-newtonian-physics/
I’ll see your Mary Wollstonecraft and raise you Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo) who wrote the dialogue “The Merits of Women, Wherein is Revealed Their Nobility and their Superiority to Men”, finishing it the day before she died during childbirth. 1592
Oof. Okay, that takes the cake.
Wow... I knew about Moderata Fonte but I did not know she died in childbirth just one day after she finished her work...
As a woman in her late thirties who hopes to find love and is on the fence about having kids ...
I'm a bit scared now.
Hospitals are eager to avoid lawsuits and will force you into a c-section prematurely if there appears to be any life or death threat to you or the baby…that’s not exactly comforting if you have an unnecessary surgical birth, but if you were a woman that would have died in childbirth previously, chances are today you won’t.
Medical science is just a completely different world these days.
We can treat pre eclampsia. We can do safe caesarians. We have all manner of scans and monitoring devices. We have antibiotics. We have anaesthetics. We have medical professionals trained to wash their hands.
Dying in childbirth is extremely rare now (in the developed world and outside the USA. The biggest risks today are suicide, homicide, and heart disease.
Childbirth used to be risky mainly due to infection and bloodloss, both of which are now very easy to treat.
Not downplaying the risks of childbirth in the 21st century in the developed world, but medicine has improved since these women passed
Cruel irony?
That the mother of the feminist movement itself would be struck down by pregnancy - a process intimately tied to our oppression as women, and a process which was made so much more dangerous by the male suppression of female folk healers, including midwives, during the witch-hunts which preceded her generation.
How many other victims did the witchfinder claim, long after even his own death?