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.
EG
, wearied from a long year spent writing her biography of Charlotte Brontë
, arrived in Rome for a holiday; she returned there several times in the next few years.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
415-17
Travel
Elizabeth Gaskell
Hereafter, Gaskell escaped from Manchester, which increasingly wearied her, by going abroad at least once a year. She spent that summer travelling through London, Wales, and then back to France, this time to...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jessie Fothergill
Referring to the novel as more powerful and far more original than Charlotte Brontë
's Jane Eyre, Shirley, or Villette, she berates those critics who insist too exclusively upon its gloom, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
A. Mary F. Robinson
It was her first of several writings on literary subjects for this periodical, most of them published in the early twentieth century. Her other contributions were French translations of earlier works, including a three-part discussion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Monica Furlong
Writing of Bunyan's near-universal appeal, MR cites the many remarkable men
Furlong, Monica. Puritan’s Progress, A Study of John Bunyan. Hodder and Stoughton.
13
who have been interested in him: she moves on to the use of his imagery by Charlotte Brontë
, Harriet Beecher Stowe
...
MO
attacks the sensation novel, a genre of fiction which she judges to be low in subject-matter (especially in its handling of sexual material), low in class connotations, and associated chiefly with women. Her idea...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
George Eliot
GE
discounts the puffery that women authors receive from critics, claiming that praise of women's work is in inverse proportion to their ability: But if they are inclined to resent our plainness of speech, we...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Rigby
ER
thought Jane and Rochester were singularly unattractive
and found the book's prose stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone . . . . It is a very remarkable book: we...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
A. S. Byatt
The writers considered (each for a single novel) are Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
, Willa Cather
(for nine of whose works ASB
also wrote Virago
introductions),
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward
and Joanna Baillie
, as well as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Frances Cornford
Cornford dedicated the book to the memory of her old friend and mentor,
Sir Edward Marsh
. She edited the book's contents, collecting, and in some cases revising, all the poems I wish to...
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.
