Charlotte Brontë The pseudonyms veiled the sisters' sex while preserving their initials; thus Charlotte was Currer Bell. "Bell" was the middle name of Haworth's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls whom Charlotte later married, and "Currer" was the surname of Frances Mary Richardson Currer who had funded their school (and maybe their father). Of the decision to use "noms de plume", Charlotte wrote: Although only two copies of the collection of poems were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their "noms de plume" when sending manuscripts to potential publishers. Brontë's first manuscript, "The Professor", did
Bronte House to refer to her lover as the 'Duke of Thunder') and in 1520, the name was officially applied to a small village on the slopes of the volcano, Mount Etna in Sicily. It was this Duchy that was awarded to Nelson, so Bronte must have seemed an apt choice of name for both the eponymous house, the beach and the suburb as they are all at what was, and indeed still is , known as Nelson Bay, a name that survives in all official maps and is much older than that of "Bronte Beach". Robert Lowe (1811-92), an Oxford graduate