(The orphaned Jane Eyre has emerged a fiercely independent...)
The orphaned Jane Eyre has emerged a fiercely independent young woman. As governess at Thornfield Hall, she’s found her first real home - though it stands in the shadow of the estate’s master, Mr. Rochester, and its haunted halls ring with maniacal laughter. For even the grandest houses have secrets.
(Agnes Grey is the daughter of a minister who faces financ...)
Agnes Grey is the daughter of a minister who faces financial ruin. Agnes decides to take up one of the only professions available to Victorian gentlewomen and become a governess.
(The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means;...)
The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and Robert, his cloth-manufacturing brother - also stand at odds to society's expectations. The novel is set in a period of social and political ferment, featuring class disenfranchisement, the drama of Luddite machine-breaking, and the divisive effects of the Napoleonic Wars.
(Villette is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 185...)
Villette is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 1853. After an unspecified family disaster, protagonist Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional city of Villette to teach at an all-girls school where she is unwillingly pulled into both adventure and romance.
(The Professor is Charlotte Brontë's first novel, in which...)
The Professor is Charlotte Brontë's first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Brontë is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire.
(From the bleak moors of Wuthering Heights to the French b...)
From the bleak moors of Wuthering Heights to the French boarding school of Villette to the gloomy, mysterious country estates of Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, these four novels show the most famous siblings in literature at the peak of their powers.
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, who portrayed the struggle of the individual to maintain his integrity with a dramatic intensity entirely new to English fiction.
Background
Ethnicity:
Charlotte Brontë was born to an Irish father and Cornish mother.
Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, West Yorkshire, England on April 21, 1816; the daughter of Patrick Brontë, an Irish Anglican minister, and Maria Brontë (née Branwell). After the early death of her mother, followed by that of the two older sisters, Brontë lived in relative isolation with her father, aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, sisters Anne and Emily, and brother Branwell.
Education
Except for a brief unhappy spell at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, two of Charlotte's sisters, Maria and Elizabeth died from tuberculosis in the aftermath of a typhoid outbreak at the school, most of her early education was guided at home by her father. The Clergy Daughters' School was later portrayed as the grim and gloomy Lowood of the opening chapters of Jane Eyre.
Between 1831 and 1832, Brontë continued her education at Roe Head in Mirfield. In 1842 - 1843 Charlotte and Emily, her sister, studied at the boarding school in Brussels run by Constantin Héger and his wife Claire Zoé Parent Héger.
Brontë began her career as a teacher in 1832 at first educating her sisters. In 1835 she returned to Roe Head, where she had studied earlier, but the work, with its inevitable restrictions, was uncongenial to Charlotte and in the summer of 1838 she terminated her engagement.
In 1839 she took up the first of many positions as governess to families in Yorkshire, a career she pursued until 1841. Brontë also took up a teaching post at the school in Brussels in 1843, but again was not happy and returned to Haworth the next year.
In 1846, Brontë paid to publish a book of poetry containing poems she and her sisters Emily and Anne had written. The three sisters used male pseudonyms - Charlotte was Currer Bell, Emily was Ellis Bell, and Anne was Acton Bell.
Brontë's first novel was The Professor, based upon her Brussels experience. It was not published during her lifetime, but encouraged by the friendly criticism of one publisher she published Jane Eyre in 1847. It became the literary success of the year. Hiding at first behind the pseudonym Currer Bell, she was brought to reveal herself by the embarrassment caused by inaccurate speculation about her true identity.
Within 8 months during 1848 - 1849, Brontë's remaining two sisters and brother died. Despite her grief she managed to finish a new novel, Shirley (1849). Set in her native Yorkshire during the Luddite industrial riots of 1812, it uses social issues as a ground for a psychological study in which the bold and active heroine is contrasted with a friend who typifies a conventionally passive and emotional female.
In her last completed novel, Villette (1853), Brontë’s main themes include isolation, how such a condition can be borne, and the internal conflict brought about by social repression of individual desire.
(Villette is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 185...)
1853
Religion
The daughter of an Irish Anglican clergyman, Brontë was herself an Anglican.
Views
A dominant and ambitious woman from a young age, she was someone who refused to blindly follow the norms the society demanded of women during her time. She was a fiercely independent woman who introduced to the literary world a new kind of heroine who defied age-old societal expectations to emerge as a courageous and virtuous individual in her own right.
Quotations:
"True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it."
"I feel monotony and death to be almost the same."
"I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward."
"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."
"I will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me, thrown at once into the midst of a large family … having the charge given me of a set of pampered, spoilt, and turbulent children, whom I was expected constantly to amuse as well as instruct."
Personality
Though one of her boarding school report cards described her abilities as "altogether clever for her age, but knows nothing systematically," Brontë was a voracious reader during her childhood and teen years, and she wrote stories and staged plays at home with her siblings. With her brother Branwell, especially, she wrote manuscripts, plays, and stories, drawing on literature, magazines, and the Bible for inspiration. For fun, they created magazines that contained everything a real magazine would have—from the essays, letters, and poems to the ads and notes from the editor.
When she was 20 years old, Brontë sent the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey some of her best poems. He wrote back in 1837, telling her that she obviously had a good deal of talent and a gift with words but that she should give up writing.
Physical Characteristics:
Brontë was of slight build and was less than five feet tall.
Interests
Writers
Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron
Connections
In June 1854, Brontë married a clergyman named Arthur Bell Nicholls and got pregnant almost immediately. Her pregnancy was far from smooth sailing though - she had acute bouts of nausea and vomiting, leading to her becoming severely dehydrated and malnourished. She and her unborn child died on March 31, 1855.
The Life of Charlotte Bronte
Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of her close friend Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim, and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle An Autobiography. It recounts Charlotte Brontë's life from her isolated childhood, through her years as a writer who had 'foreseen the single life' for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than a year later. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - explored the nature of Charlotte's genius and almost single-handedly created the Brontë myth.