Charlotte Brontë

Fire takes four of the ten planets, air three, water two and a single one earth, with four of the ten fixed and four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Bronte wrote Jane Eyre under the name Currer Bell, because a novel by a woman would have been read differently, and that of the three sisters who reached adulthood, Bronte was the eldest and the last to die.

Mercury sits a fifth of a turn from Mars at eight hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact here, and the reading is mental energy that goes somewhere: people who think clearly under pressure and who finish what they start explaining. In a novelist that last clause is the trade stated as a habit, and finishing is the part of writing that separates a book from an intention.

Saturn sits sixty degrees from Neptune at two thirds of a degree, imagination made durable: artists who finish things, and faith that survives scrutiny. Both halves have a record behind them. Jane Eyre was finished, and the scrutiny the faith had to survive is named in the same sentence as the book, because the pseudonym existed to get the novel read on its own terms rather than as the work of a woman. That is a fact about an audience rather than about a chart, and the chart has nothing to add to it.

Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at a quarter of a degree, practical innovation: new ideas that are actually built, and an unusual patience for slow change, and in quiet contact with Pluto at under nine tenths, durable strength. Three contacts in a row running to Saturn, the planet of limit, in a record whose central fact is a limit worked around. A single planet in earth, with four in fire, is the balance. The Moon sits on the twenty fifth degree of Aquarius at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune were the three retrograde planets. Death came at Haworth on 31 March 1855, at thirty eight. Venus stood in direct opposition to the natal Jupiter at under a fifth of a degree that day and Saturn opposite the natal Uranus at a third. The Moon was gibbous and ninety six per cent lit.