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
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...
Friends, Associates Julia Kavanagh
JK (by this time herself a published author) wrote a letter to Charlotte Brontë in praise of Jane Eyre.
Wise, Thomas J., editor. The Brontës. Porcupine Press.
II: 173
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.
Friends, Associates Julia Kavanagh
Charlotte Brontë called on JK at her home in London.
Wise, Thomas J., editor. The Brontës. Porcupine Press.
III: 118
Friends, Associates Julia Kavanagh
Charlotte Brontë noted that while JK admired the work, she considered the Maniac Mrs Rochester to be shocking.
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.
Wise, Thomas J., editor. The Brontës. Porcupine Press.
II: 173
The two women shared a mutual acquaintance in William Smith Williams , a reader...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
H. F. Chorley , the Athenæum reviewer, lauded it as an excellent story for young people, sound in morals and pleasant in incident,—with only one passing apparition of the Deus ex machina to disturb our...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
On 22 November 1848, Charlotte Brontë wrote to William Smith Williams (a friend of both herself and the author), I have read Madeleine. It is a fine pearl in simple setting. Julia Kavanagh has...
Intertextuality and Influence Julia Kavanagh
Two years before Nathalie appeared, JK had told Charlotte Brontë that Jane Eyrehad been to her a suggestive book. Reporting this, Brontë added, and I know that suggestive books are valuable to authors.
Wise, Thomas J., editor. The Brontës. Porcupine Press.
II: 182
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
Nathalie was praised by JK 's fellow novelist Katharine S. Macquoid .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Charlotte Brontë , meanwhile, became an avowed admirer of the novel. On 21 January 1851 she wrote JK : Do not expect me...
Intertextuality and Influence Julia Kavanagh
Scholars agree that JK 's Nathalie in turn influenced Brontë 's Villette, which was published three years later. Some note a particular resemblance between JK 's Nathalie and Brontë's Lucy Snowe.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge.
Shirley Foster ...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
This novel was not as successful as JK 's earlier efforts. Charlotte Brontë confided to William Smith Williams , I have tried to read Daisy Burns; at the close of the 1st Vol. I...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
Charlotte Brontë told Williams that she read this work with gratification and found that Kavanagh's charity and (on the whole) her impartiality are very beautiful.
Wise, Thomas J., editor. The Brontës. Porcupine Press.
III: 326
Though pleased with the work as a whole...
Reception Julia Kavanagh
Critics have drawn different conclusions from the perceived connection between JK 's life and her works. Katharine S. Macquoid noted in 1897 that Kavanagh never obtrudes her personality on the reader, though she lifts him...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Annie Keary
In this book a little girl who gets hold of Brontë 's Jane Eyre from the adult shelves and reads it in secret is felt to be doing a very unsuitable as well as a...
Family and Intimate relationships Claire Keegan
CK 's mother used to talk about Charlotte BrontëJane Eyre, but she did not actually read the novel until she was in college.
O’Hagan, Sean. “Claire Keegan: ’Short stories are limited. I’m cornered into writing what I can’”. The Guardian.

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