Today, dear reader, we’re cracking open the whiskey and howling at the moon to honor Charlotte Brontë, the fiercest writer to ever rise from Yorkshire’s windswept moors (where else will you read “Yorkshire’s windswept moors” today?  That’s right…only here, baby.  Anyway.).  Born on April 21st, 1816, this tiny dynamo penned Jane Eyre and unleashed a firestorm of raw female fury on the stuffy Victorian elite.

Charlotte wasn’t some dainty damsel sipping tea and playing nice with society’s rules.  Hell no!  She was a literary renegade, a five-foot-nothing whirlwind of rebellion who looked the sexist gatekeepers of her time dead in the eye and sneered, “I’ll write what I goddamn please.”  Jane Eyre roars with defiance, its heroine a plain, poor governess who spits in the face of societal norms, refusing to bend to the chauvinist pricks who’d have her on her knees.  Charlotte, with her sisters Emily and Anne, had to hide behind male pseudonyms to get past the era’s misogynistic bouncers, but once inside, they proved women could wield words with a savage precision that would leave any man quaking.

Let’s not romanticize the grind, though.  Charlotte’s life was a brutal slog through the muck.  She married late, got pregnant, and then died in 1855, likely from vicious morning sickness that hit harder than a tank.  She didn’t live to see her legacy ignite, but when it did, it burned bright and fierce.  Charlotte showed the world that women could write with relentless, unapologetic power – her prose a razor blade slicing through the lace of Victorian decorum.

So here we are, on Charlotte Brontë’s birthday, saluting the hell-raising queen of the moors.  We celebrate the woman who shattered the mold and laughed in the face of convention.  She’s the patron saint of every writer who’s ever been told to sit down and shut up, every misfit who’s carved their own jagged path through the wilderness.  Raise your glass, turn your inner rebel up to eleven, and toast to the legend: Happy birthday, Charlotte!

In more temporally local news, I am officially behind schedule with the writing.  I’ve got maybe two days to get back on track before Mgmt figures out what’s up and descends into dark states of piss-off and they resume their daily harangues.  Which is why I’ll be brief here and get back to it.

N.P.: “Beat on the Brat” – Daniel Hjálmtýsson, Mortiis