Ellen Nussey (pictured) was the lifelong friend of which famous author?

Ellen Nussey (1817-1897) was the daughter of a cloth merchant in Yorkshire, Northern England.

She met Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) when both were pupils at Roe Head School, and thus began a friendship that was to last throughout Charlotte's lifetime.

Ellen visited the Bronte family home at Haworth Parsonage on several occasions (she is even listed as a visitor in the 1851 census), and also became friends with Charlotte's sisters Emily and Anne (the reclusive Emily forming a rare friendship outside the family) but was closest to Charlotte, and they exchanged hundreds of letters. Ellen allowed Elizabeth Gaskell, another good friend of Charlotte's, access to these letters when Mrs Gaskell was writing her famous biography of Charlotte Bronte.

At once point, they may even have become related, as Ellen's brother George proposed to Charlotte in 1839, but she found him rather tedious and refused the offer.

Ellen appeared not to bear any grudge, and when Charlotte did eventually marry Arthur Nicholls in 1854, she was one of the witnesses.

Unlike Charlotte and her sisters, she lived into old age and was much sought out by Bronte scholars.