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.
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
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 .
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.
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...
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...
Education Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters , Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein . Isak Dinesen was to come later.
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
Education Malorie Blackman
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...
Education Kate Clanchy
As a child KC loved Victorian stories for girls—Frances Hodgson Burnett 's A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (or Susan Coolidge)'s What Katy Did, and Louisa May Alcott
Education Alice Meynell
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 . ....
Education F. Tennyson Jesse
Though FTJ did not receive much formal education, she read voraciously. Important discoveries were theBrontësisters , Jane Austen , and Constance Garnett 's translations of Tolstoy .
Colenbrander, Joanna. A Portrait of Fryn. A. Deutsch, 1984.
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...

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.
10 April 1858
An advertisement for Mudie's Circulating Library boasted of its vast holdings of popular titles.
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 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.
1886
Eva Hope 's Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era singled out Mary Somerville , Harriet Martineau , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot , and Felicia Hemans .