Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Brontë
-
Standard Name: Brontë, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Brontë
Married Name: Mrs Arthur Bell Nicholls
Pseudonym: Currer Bell
Used Form: Charlotte Bronte
CB
's five novels, with their passionate explorations of the dilemmas facing nineteenth-century middle-class English women, have made her perhaps the most loved, imitated, resisted, and hotly debated novelist of the Victorian period.
"Charlotte Brontë, etching, after 1850" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB#/media/File:Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
In 2016 HD
contributed Grace Poole: Her Testimony to a volume of stories in honour of Charlotte Brontë
entitled Reader, I Married Him, and edited by Tracy Chevalier
.
EB
was influentially represented by her sister Charlotte
, in her biographical preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, as living apart from the world, a homebody who was not naturally gregarious and...
Cultural formation
Harriet Martineau
In a letter to Charlotte Brontë
, HM
expressed her views thus: I cannot conceive the absence of a First Cause; but then I contend that it is not a person, i. e. that it...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
When her savings ran out, she left university and by the next year she was teaching again in Belmont, P.E.I. Among the influential books she read in the next few years were Olive Schreiner
's...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
Some sources say that PS
attended a secondary modern school in Staines (that is one with non-academic aims and expectations). But attendance at a private school is strongly implied by her poem about a girls'...
Education
H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric
. Eric also provided his sister...
Education
Emily Brontë
A plan was formed that the sisters would open their own school to support themselves, and Charlotte
decided that she and Emily needed further education in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors. On 8...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë
, T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
), she began reading Rilke
. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
47
Education
Margaret Forster
As a very small child MF
was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums.
Forster, Margaret. Hidden Lives. Viking, 1995.
121-2
At two she talked in long sentences . . . and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to...
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
16
Education
Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR
imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
Education
Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM
's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1975.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
808
Education
Agatha Christie
By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller
believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll
Timeline
21 June 1798
The Society of United Irishmen
, a progressive nationalist group (nonsectarian but largely Dissenting) dedicated to overthrowing Anglican minority rule in Ireland, was virtually destroyed in an armed clash at Ballanahinch.
10 November 1811
In Nottinghamshire weavers caused alarm by breaking into a factory where machines did the weaving; such rioters were called frame-breakers or Luddites.
February 1812
The first Luddite riots in the West Riding of Yorkshire occurred.
1837
Fredrika Bremer
published her domestic novelGrannarne, translated into English in 1842 as Neighbours.
March 1848
Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.
21 March 1853
The thirty-year-old Matthew Arnold
addressed to Arthur Hugh Clough
a classically misogynist letterabout women writers, their works and their looks.
By 20 June 1857
W. W. Carus Wilson
published A Refutation of the Statements in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Regarding the Caterton Clergy Daughters' School when at Cowan Bridge.
1858
Rachel Felix
, the celebrated tragic actress, died of pulmonary consumption.
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
1868
Tractarian F. E. Paget
published his satiricsensation novelLucretia; or, the Heroine of the Nineteenth Century.
By Christmas 1869
Francis Galton
, mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,
1877
The House on the Marsh appeared in print: a mysterynovel, the second work by Florence Warden, whose real name was Florence Alice James.
April 1879
James Murray
—editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell; Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Wuthering Heights</span>; Extract from the Prefatory Note to ’Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell’”. Wuthering Heights, edited by Professor Ian Jack and Professor Ian Jack, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 359 - 65; 365.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Charlotte Brontë. “Farewell to Angria”. Jane Eyre, edited by Richard J. Dunn and Richard J. Dunn, 2ndnd ed, W. W. Norton, 1987, pp. 426-7.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder, 1847.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Shannon Goetze. My Angria and the Angrians. Editors McMaster, Juliet and Leslie Robertson, Juvenilia Press, 1997.
Brontë, Charlotte, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë. Poems. Aylott and Jones, 1846.
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. Smith, Elder, 1849.
Brontë, Charlotte. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Smith, Margaret, Clarendon Press, 2000.
Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. Smith, Elder, 1857.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Smith, Elder, 1853.
Brontë, Emily, Anne Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë. Wuthering Heights; and, Agnes Grey. Smith, Elder, 1850.