By Emma Clayton

Charlotte Bronte's face adorns bookmarks, postcards, pencils, tea-towels and souvenir thimbles.

It is the face gazing out from the covers of paperbacks and biographies - the face of a country parson's daughter, a literary powerhouse and a feminist icon.

The image is from George Richmond's 1850 portrait, more flattering than her brother Branwell's 'gun group' painting, and so familiar that we feel we know her.

Less familiar are the rather grotesque self portraits, revealing Charlotte's insecurities about her looks. One, thought to have been sketched at school, reveals a large hook nose, prominent brow and shrewish eyes peering out beneath thick eyebrows. The other is a cartoon of a hunchback dwarf with witch-like features next to a pretty young lady, thought to be Charlotte's friend, Ellen Nussey.

"Poor, obscure, plain and little," is how Jane Eyre describes herself, and while there are strands of autobiography throughout her novel, that was a diluted version of how Charlotte regarded her own appearance.

According to letters she wrote, and her self portraits, Charlotte saw herself as beyond plain – she thought she was ugly. She told her biographer Elizabeth Gaskell: "I notice that after a stranger has once looked at my face he is careful not to let his eyes wander to that part of the room again."

While her unrequited love for the Belgian schoolteacher can't have helped her self-esteem, Charlotte's insecurity is thought to stem largely from school, where mixing with pretty mill-owners' daughters made her self-conscious about her comparatively drab appearance. To the casual observer, there would be nothing remarkable about the three motherless sisters living at Haworth's draughty hilltop parsonage.

Marriage didn't raise Charlotte's self-esteem. "I took care to get it in cheap material," she wrote of her wedding dress in 1854, believing she wouldn't do justice to anything pretty. And even when she tasted success as a published author, while she was so confident of her writing talent to be considered unrefined by Victorian standards, she remained painfully aware that she was no beauty.

As we celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte's birth this month, we could be forgiven for thinking that there can't be much left to say or write about her that hasn't already been covered. We know more about Charlotte than any of her siblings, largely thanks to countless biographies and the constantly shifting theories about her legacy.

We know her as strong, clever, ambitious, but she was complex too. A literary celebrity plagued with shyness, a feminist trailblazer steeped in insecurity, fiercely independent but scarred by unrequited love.

Two hundred years after her birth, and more than 160 years after her death, Charlotte continues to fascinate us, enough to look beyond the enigmatic gaze of Richmond's portrait.