In 1835, she returned to Miss Wooler’s school as a teacher, and Emily accompanied her as a scholar. Charlotte’s life here was very happy. The girls were hardly strangers to her, some of them being younger sisters of those who had been her own playmates; and however trying the duties were she had to perform, there was always a thoughtful friend watching over her in the person of good Miss Wooler. But her life was too sedentary, and she was advised to return to the parsonage. She did so, and the change at once proved beneficial.
At Haworth she met the person who made the first proposal of marriage to her. Miss Brontë respected the young man very deeply, but as she did not really love him, she refused to marry him. Soon after, an Irish clergyman, fresh from Dublin University, whom she had only met once, sent her a letter, which proved to be a declaration of love and a proposal of matrimony. But although she had no hope of another offer, the witty, lively, and ardent Irishman was summarily rejected. Restored to health and strength, instead of remaining at Haworth to be a burden to her father, and to live on there in idleness perhaps for years, she determined, if everything else failed, to turn housemaid. Soon after, she became engaged as a governess in a family where she was destined to find an ungenial residence. The children all loved her, more or less, according to their different characters. But the mother was proud and pompous, and Miss Brontë as proud, though not so pompous, as she. In 1839, she left the family of the wealthy Yorkshire manufacturer; and in 1841, found her second and last situation as a governess. This time she became a member of a kind-hearted and friendly household. But her salary, after deducting the expense of washing, amounted to only £16; moreover, the career of a governess was to Miss Brontë a perpetual attempt to force her faculties into a direction for which her previous life had unfitted them. So at Christmas she left this situation.
Several attempts to open a school at the parsonage having proved futile, with the view of better qualifying themselves for the task of teaching, Miss Brontë and her sister Emily went to Brussels in 1842, and took up their abode in Madame Héger’s _pensionnat_. Towards the close of the year, word came from England that her aunt, Miss Branwell, was very ill. Before they got home, the funeral was over, and Mr. Brontë and Anne were sitting together in quiet grief for one who had done her part well in the household for nearly twenty years. About the end of January, 1843, Miss Brontë returned to Brussels alone for another six months.