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.
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 Virginia Woolf
Between 1 January and 30 June 1897, her reading included but was not limited to the following: Charlotte Brontë , Lady Barlow (a commentator on Charles Darwin ), Dinah Mulock Craik , George Eliot ,...
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 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 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 Sue Townsend
ST was eight before she learned to read but from then on, although she did poorly at school, she read with enthusiasm. After Richmal Crompton (Just William) came Charlotte Brontë : Jane Eyre...
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 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 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 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 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...

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 .