One division between childhood and adulthood is the recognition that the way you would like things to be may never coincide with the way things are. For most people, the concept is not easily accepted nor easily implemented. Branwell retreated from it. Charlotte and Anne chose the real world. Emily seems to have given imagination and reality equal weight, drifting from one to the other without sensing a conflict at all.
Charlotte is fascinating.
I like her best in her twenties when she was taking real and personal risks. She had an enormous amount of resilience and spark, and a decidedly racy taste in heros. It makes her later years deeply poignant, filling me with helpless regret to read of the aching loss from the early deaths of her siblings which left her emotionally isolated, the succumbing to religious morbidity, and her gradual acceptance of the awful knowledge that her ideal lover would never come. She managed to reconcile her needs with the limits of Victorian society and its definition of female roles, though she was never content with the situation. Here was a woman of tremendous talent, quivering with emotional power, possessing a keen, observant mind, who forced herself to submit to stifling convention because she thought that it was her fate to suffer, that God doled out happiness unevenly, a conviction Branwell also held.