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
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. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
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...
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...
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 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...
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 Margaret Forster
As a very small child MF was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums.
Forster, Margaret. Hidden Lives. Viking, 1995.
121-2
At two she talked in long sentences . . . and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to...
Education Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
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...
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 H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric . Eric also provided his sister...
Education Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë , T. S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson ), she began reading Rilke . Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
47
Education Amy Levy
At some time during her girlhood AL listed her favourite poets as all men, while her favourite prose writers included Charlotte Brontë , Elizabeth Gaskell , George Eliot , and Anne Thackeray Ritchie .
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
16
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 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

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.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
3-4
Adelman, Paul. Great Britain and the Irish Question 1800-1922. Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.
25

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.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
81 (1811): 2, 476, 581

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.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
45-47

1837: Fredrika Bremer published her domestic novel...

Writing climate item

1837

Fredrika Bremer published her domestic novel Grannarne, translated into English in 1842 as Neighbours.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
784 (5 November 1842): 949

March 1848: Chartist uprisings took place in London,...

National or international item

March 1848

Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.
Royle, Edward. Chartism. Longman, 1980.
40-3

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 letter about women writers, their works and their looks.
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
21 March 2008

1856: In Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical...

Building item

1856

In Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical Restraints, physician John Conolly dramatically portrayed the advantages of state incarceration for mentally unstable women.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Pantheon Books, 1985.
68
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Pantheon Books, 1985.
66, 68, 79
Elaine Showalter draws the connection between lunacy debates...

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.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(20 June 1857): 789

1858: Rachel Felix, the celebrated tragic actress,...

Building item

1858

Rachel Felix , the celebrated tragic actress, died of pulmonary consumption.
Booth, Michael R. et al. Three Tragic Actresses: Siddons, Rachel, Ristori. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
115

10 April 1858: An advertisement for Mudie's Circulating...

Writing climate item

10 April 1858

An advertisement for Mudie's Circulating Library boasted of its vast holdings of popular titles.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(10 April 1858): 453

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 satiric sensation novel Lucretia; or, the Heroine of the Nineteenth Century.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
218-19

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,
Saturday Review. Chawton.
28.739 (25 December 1869): 832-3

1877: The House on the Marsh appeared in print:...

Women writers item

1877

The House on the Marsh appeared in print: a mystery novel, the second work by Florence Warden, whose real name was Florence Alice James.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Reference sources, including the Feminist Companion, mistakenly attribute a later publication date.

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.
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything. Oxford University Press, 2003.
93, 107, 109

Texts

Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell; Editors Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights; 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, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton, 1987, pp. 426-7.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder, 1847, 3 vols.
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, 3 vols.
Brontë, Charlotte. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Smith, Margaret, 1931 -, Clarendon Press, 2000, 3 vols.
Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. Smith, Elder, 1857, 2 vols.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Smith, Elder, 1853, 3 vols.
Brontë, Emily et al. Wuthering Heights; and, Agnes Grey. Smith, Elder, 1850.