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.
EJW
published her purified and evangelicalized reworking of Charlotte Brontë
's Jane Eyre under the title Thornycroft Hall: Its Owners and its Heirs.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1940 (1864): 893
Jay, Elisabeth. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Clarendon Press.
246
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Jane Worboise
Each chapter begins with a religious epigraph. This novel recounts the story of the attractive nineteen-year-old bride, Lilian Grey, who makes a marriage above her social class with the aristocratic Basil Hope.
Worboise, Emma Jane. The Wife’s Trials; Married Life; Husbands and Wives. Garland.
The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection.
McNeillie, Andrew, and Virginia Woolf. “Introduction”. The Common Reader, Annotated Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. ix - xv.
x
Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...
Textual Production
Rebecca West
In 1933 RW
wrote an essay about Emmeline Pankhurst
for The Post-Victorians. She also wrote essays about Charlotte Brontë
, for The Great Victorians (1932), and Elizabeth Montagu
, for From Anne to Victoria (1937).
West, Rebecca. “Bibliography”. Rebecca West: A Celebration, edited by Samuel Hynes, Viking Press, pp. 761-6.
763-4
Textual Features
Eudora Welty
The word regional, said Welty, is careless, condescending, and an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing.Jane Austen
, theBrontësisters
, and the writers...
Performance of text
Fay Weldon
FW
's career as a playwright was active and successful by the late 1960s, and she has written many one-act plays, as well as longer pieces. Her works for theatre include an adaptation from four...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Augusta Webster
She omits reviews from this collection, but provides readers with an opportunity to consider literary topics. The Translation of Poetry argues that because [i]n poetry the form of the thought is part of the thought...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
As a child SW
loved writing poems and stories, all entirely derivative from her reading of popular books like the Dr Who novelizations. In the sixth form at school she began to find the study...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
SW
puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
Textual Production
Mary Augusta Ward
MAW
produced a series of introductions to the Haworth edition of works by Charlotte
, Emily
, and Anne Brontë
.
Understanding the difficulties of dealing in detail with Victorian religious perplexity, MAW
herself placed the book in the tradition of religious or social propaganda
Ward, Mary Augusta. A Writer’s Recollections. Harper and Brothers.
The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan
, William Lovett
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
The heroine is described as deriving from a long line of English gentry, Whig supporters of the Empire: a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English...
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.
