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.
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
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
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
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
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...
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
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
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...
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.
