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.
LMA
began writing while she was very young. At the age of ten she began a journal which was soon afterwards read and commented on by her mother
. She was also a regular contributor...
The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...
Textual Features
Ruby M. Ayres
Dark Gentleman carries an unascribed epigraph from Caroline Norton
: Until I truly loved—I was alone.
Ayres, Ruby M. Dark Gentleman. Hodder and Stoughton.
title-page
Its title is the name given by Judith Anson to Simon Trenchard, with whom at last she achieves...
CB
was a balladeer and poet who composed music for songs written by herself and by others such as Alfred Tennyson
and Charlotte Brontë
. Over the span of eleven years she composed about a...
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...
Textual Production
Patricia Beer
PB
's Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, Elizabeth Gaskell
, and George Eliot was a harbinger of serious critical interest in the women's literary tradition.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research.
25
Intertextuality and Influence
Patricia Beer
PB
produces a cryptic comment on the popular notion of literary androgyny in Transvestism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë. Belatedly, she says, she has realised that the most important question in the novels...
Textual Features
Patricia Beer
PB
here considers a series of canonical authors, Austen
, Eliot
, Charlotte Brontë
, and Elizabeth Gaskell
, and the way that the Woman Question was handled in fiction. Critic John Mullan
notes her...
Literary responses
Patricia Beer
Responses to PB
's poetry have varied widely, even among her fellow poets. Jeni Couzyn
has charged her with the crime of not rocking the boat, of making herself a favourite . . . for...
Textual Production
Phyllis Bentley
PB
published her first of five critical texts about the lives and works of the threeBrontësisters
, The Brontës.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 191. Gale Research.
27
Author summary
Phyllis Bentley
Phyllis Bentley
was a prolific and successful novelist, literary critic, short-story writer, children's writer, and journalist, who was productive over a broad span of the twentieth century. Almost all her twenty-eight novels and numerous short...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bentley
Set (like its successors) in the fictional valley of the Ire (based on the Colne Valley) in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Inheritance follows five generations of three families involved in the cloth...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
PB
was deeply influenced by the Brontës
, whose home at Haworth was close to where she herself grew up in Halifax. As a daydreaming child she strongly identified with the Brontës
' imaginary worlds...
Timeline
21 June 1798: The Society of United Irishmen, a progressive...
National or international item
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...
Building item
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...
Building item
February 1812
The first Luddite riots in the West Riding of Yorkshire occurred.
1837: Fredrika Bremer published her domestic novel...
Writing climate item
1837
Fredrika Bremer
published her domestic novelGrannarne, translated into English in 1842 as Neighbours.
March 1848: Chartist uprisings took place in London,...
National or international item
March 1848
Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.
21 March 1853: The thirty-year-old Matthew Arnold addressed...
Writing climate item
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...
Writing climate item
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,...
Building item
1858
Rachel Felix
, the celebrated tragic actress, died of pulmonary consumption.
10 April 1858: An advertisement for Mudie's Circulating...
1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...
Writing climate item
1861
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 satiric...
Writing climate item
1868
Tractarian F. E. Paget
published his satiricsensation novelLucretia; or, the Heroine of the Nineteenth Century.
By Christmas 1869: Francis Galton, mathematician, scientist,...
Writing climate item
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:...
Women writers item
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...
Writing climate item
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.
1886: Eva Hope's Queens of Literature of the Victorian...
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 et al. 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.