Currer Bell was the pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre and Villette. In the Introduction she explains how she and her two sisters, Emily and Anne, used pseudonyms in a bid to get their first efforts at poetry published because “we did not like to declare ourselves women because we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”