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.
MB
was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis
's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri
's Heidi books...
Education
Jackie Kay
In her early years at school in Glasgow, JK
had problems with bullies who taunted her because of her skin colour. She retaliated privately by writing little poems of revenge.
“Writer’s ’revenge’ on school bullies”. BBC News.
At school she was...
Education
Mary Gawthorpe
Apprenticeship included some part-time attendance at the Pupil-Teacher Centre
in the LeedsSchool Board
offices. There MG
continued with largely the same subjects as at school, with the addition of French, educational theory, psychology, and...
In the summer of 1852 Elizabeth and Alice Thompson (later AM
) began their education under their father's instruction. Recording her daughters' lessons, Christiana Thompson writes, Dear little angels do their writing . ....
Colenbrander, Joanna. A Portrait of Fryn. A. Deutsch.
33
Education
Emilie Barrington
William Rathbone Greg
, a friend of EB
's father (and according to Martha Westwater
the inspiration for Charlotte Brontë
's Rochester), tutored all six Wilson sisters, paying attention in his teaching to the subject...
Education
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Her family's financial troubles prevented EJP
from receiving a formal or thorough education. In her own words, education was not within the reach of the gently born who were also poor, therefore I had little...
Education
Sophia Jex-Blake
SJB
fervently pursued more knowledge, and travelled to Edinburgh in early 1862, where she was tutored in various subjects. Here she became enamoured of Charlotte BrontëJane Eyre, appreciating the novel for its grand steadfastness and...
Education
Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP
) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Cultural formation
Emily Brontë
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...
Anthologization
Helen Dunmore
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
.
