Charlotte Brontë - World's Greatest Classic Books

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Charlotte Brontë

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Charlotte Brontë

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Born: April 21, 1816, in Thorton, Yorkshire, England

Died: March 31, 1855, in Haworth, Yorkshire, England

Charlotte Brontë's most noted novel, Jane Eyre, about a young woman struggling with her desires and social responsibilities, brought a new truth to storytelling in the Victorian era.

Her father was an Irish-born, Anglican clergyman who held many curacies before moving with his wife and six children to a position in Haworth in 1820. The rector changed his name to Brunty, a more common form of Brontë. Soon after the move Charlotte's mother and two older sisters died. The remaining children were raised with the help of an aunt, Elizabeth Branswell.

Charlotte attended Clergy Daughters School at Cowan's Bridge, Lancaster. Veiled condemnation of this school with gruel-like food and corporal punishment are contained within Jane Eyre. She returned home in 1825 and spent the next five years on the moor in Haworth. In 1831, she was sent to study at Miss Woller's school at Roe Head. Here she made lasting friendships such as the one with Ellen Nussey. Their correspondence has provided much of the available information about Brontë's life.

In 1835, she returned to the school to teach, bringing Emily with her. The career was short-lived and after three years she retired because of depression and sickness. After taking jobs as a tutor and governess, she and her sister, Emily, moved to Brussels to study with the hope of eventually opening a school close to their family in Haworth. Her time in Brussels provided her with valuable, but solitary personal experience which is evident in her lonely characterization of Lucy Snow in Villette, published in 1852.

After completing studies in Europe, Charlotte returned to England to start a school. However, she failed to attract students because of the remote location of Haworth. If it were not for this failure, however, she may not have been able to devote her time to the art of writing.

When Charlotte discovered that all the sisters had written poetry, they published a volume of verse under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The pseudonyms were an attempt to avoid attention that was considered inappropriate for women during this era. The disguise was unnecessary because the publication sold only two copies.

Brontë's first novel, Jane Eyre, was published along with two other works by her sisters in 1847. The impact of this novel was immediate. Her use of a child to represent a naive sensibility was a unique technique that Dickens later used in his books. She also broke new ground by presenting the picture of love from a woman's perspective. This early feminism startled many Victorian readers who were accustomed to only the male view. The book's resounding success led to the opportunity to publish further pieces.

However, with success came personal tragedy. Her brother died in 1848, followed by her sisters' deaths shortly after. Charlotte stayed on in Haworth and continued to write. Later in life, she was accepted into the community of writers in England, including Thackeray and Martineau.

Charlotte was the only one of the Brontë sisters to marry. She turned down three suitors before marrying Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854. Her pregnancy and accompanying sickness cut short their life together. She died in 1855.

Jane Eyre
The story of an orphan who later becomes a governess and finds a lover. This was Bronte’s most successful novel, and it remains her most famous work. Much of Jane Eyre is said to be based on Charlotte’s own unhappy childhood.

The Professor
The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Bronte's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.

Shirley
Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Brontë vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning."

The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell	'It is in every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another ... it ought to stand, and will stand in the first rank, of Biographies, till the end of time' - Patrick Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell's Life appeared in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim among Victorian readers curious to discover more about the writer who had given Jane Eyre the subtitle, An Autobiography. In writing about Charlotte Bronte, whom she greatly admired, but whose novels she did not entirely like, Elizabeth Gaskell portrays the struggle of a woman artist for whom she had, until her late marriage, 'foreseen the single life'. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - almost single-handedly created the Bronte myth. As Elisabeth Jay discusses in her introduction to this new edition, Gaskell weaves facts, dates, characters and anecdotes with considerable art; her Charlotte Bronte was 'an imaginative creation and, as such, took on a life of its own'. The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in an appendix.

Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon	This highly acclaimed biography looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones. Instead we see a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Lyndall Gordon looks at the shared gifts and class ambitions of the Bronte family, and also at significant people - the active feminist Mary Taylor, the demanding mentor Constantin Heger, the rising publisher George Smith - whom Charlotte strove to possess in life and fiction. Drawing on unpublished letter, the "Roe Head Journal," early stories, the manuscript of Villette, and her last, unfinished novel, Lyndall Gordon explores the gaps in Charlotte Bronte's life. How did she arrive at her understanding of passion from a woman's point of view? Could she resolve the testing conflict between a writer's life and a seemingly incongruous marriage to the devoted curate Arthur Bell Nicholls? Looking into the shadow between the facts, Gordon takes biography into that unseen space where this woman of genius was able to live. "Intensely felt and argued. . . . Bronte has found in Gordon a biographer whose intelligence and passion are worthy of her own." -Brigitte Weeks, Washington Post Book World "[The] contradictions in [Bronte]'s life are not only full chronicled by Lyndall Gordon's splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work. . . . [Gordon] chooses to use her imaginative sympathies - honed to precision with earlier biographies of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot - to delineate her subject's rich interior life." -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times LYNDALL GORDON is the author of prize-winning biographies that include Eliot's Early Years, Eliot's New Life, and Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, which is also available in Norton paperback. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Gordon received her doctorate from Columbia University and taught at the University of Oxford. She now writes fulltime.

Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived by Helene Moglen	"[Moglen's] dynamic handling of Charlotte's dialectic progress as woman and artist toward 'the self conceived' makes the traditional scholarship of previous, larger biographies pale by comparison." -The New York Times "This is a fine biography, thoroughgoing and provocative ... Not only is it a biographical design particularly suited to a study of an emerging 20th-century woman, but it employs a combination of analytic tools which provoke thought in a way the historical recording of a life's events simply cannot." -The Washington Post "...in this compelling study of Bronte's life and art, Moglen transcends...traditional limitations, and breaks through to a consistently intelligent interpretation of the interactions between Bronte's personality and fiction. She combines an unusually subtle and coherent psychological analysis of biographical data with detailed readings of each major novel to develop both a convincing portrait of a personality matured through writing and of fictions informed more and more richly by psychological awareness." -Studies in Romanticism "An excellent and compelling biography. Moglen has achieved what I have long hoped for: a critical-biographical study of a woman writer which understands and presents with clarity the major force in the development of a female psyche. This biography is in every way likely to add importantly to our knowledge of Bronte and of women writers." -Carolyn G. Heilburn, Columbia University