Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of 15 remarkable women.
Charlotte Brontë was a 20-year-old schoolteacher — impatient, dreamy, long-suffering, unpublished — when, in 1836, she sent a sample of her writing to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate at the time. Although her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell would eventually write of Brontë’s “constitutional absence of hope,” the young teacher clearly already had a firm sense of her own worth — an enterprising spirit and ambition, and a longing for her own genius to find its way into the world. Read on: nytimes/obituaries/overlooked-charlotte-bronte