Charlotte Brontë

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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.
Etching of Charlotte Brontë after a portrait by George Richmond, 1850. She is seen from the waist up, seated, with one elbow resting on a table, that hand holding a small book and the other on her lap, holding a handkerchief. She wears a flat ribbon round her neck, and a dark dress, buttoned in front, with lace trim on the sleeves and bodice. Her dark, smooth hair is pulled back and tied with a dark ribbon.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Anne Brontë
Newby 's advertisement of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the US as the work of Currer Bell prompted Charlotte and AB to make a sudden trip to London to refute the claim.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
557
Family and Intimate relationships Emily Brontë
Two of EB 's sisters, Maria and Elizabeth , died before she reached the age of seven. With Charlotte , her elder by two years, and Anne , her younger by eighteen months, Emily engaged...
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Brontë
AB 's elder sisters were Maria (born in 1814), Elizabeth , (1815), Charlotte , (1816), and Emily (1818).
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
59, 61, 71, 78
Leisure and Society Emily Brontë
During childhood and early adulthood the Brontë siblings produced elaborate fantasy worlds, which they acted out as plays, in part with toy figures. These worlds came to have individualized personae, geographies, and histories, which...
Textual Production Anne Brontë
Although some of the collaboratively produced juvenilia of the Brontë children is still extant, none has survived that was individually authored by AB .
Chitham, Edward. A Life of Anne Brontë. B. Blackwell.
5
In their childhood play which developed into the fantasy worlds...
Health Emily Brontë
EB apparently had a very independent character. In a famous incident related to Elizabeth Gaskell by Charlotte , Emily tried to help a possibly rabid dog, only to have it bite her. She immediately went...
Textual Production Anne Brontë
Charlotte , Emily , and Anne published a collection, Poems, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Bell was the middle name of their father's curate.
Gérin, Winifred. Emily Brontë: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
185
They received their first copies on...
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...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
On 4 July 1846 two anonymous reviews of Poems by Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell appeared, one mildly positive by Sydney Dobell in the Athenæum, and one enthusiastic in the Critic. A...
Reception Emily Brontë
Not until after a larger selection of poems, heavily edited by Charlotte , was included along with the biographical preface in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, did EB 's poetry begin to receive...
Reception Anne Brontë
An anonymous reviewer of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in The Spectator for 18 December 1847 commented that the work of all three Charlotte BrontëEmily BrontëBrontë s suffered from injudicious selection of the theme and matter.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
218
Textual Production Emily Brontë
A letter from her publisher Newby in February 1848 suggests that EB had consulted him about the publication of another novel, then in progress. At the end of the year, he announced that another work...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Brontë
Critic Elizabeth Langland credits AB 's first novel as one of the first by a woman to tell a humble, domestic story and to discover the techniques by which it could win an audience. The...
Fictionalization Emily Brontë
Charlotte 's Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, her prefaces to Wuthering Heights, and the selection of poems sought to defend her sisters' character and works from the charges of reviewers. She...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
The novel was reviewed immediately by The Spectator and the Athenæum. The former accused the author of a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal, and objected to the coarseness of...

Timeline

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Texts

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