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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Oliphant
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...
Textual Production Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's contribution was The Sisters BrontëEmily BrontëAnne Brontë, a sharply perceived and proto-feminist analysis.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
343
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
12
MO was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott (Grace Greenwood) that...
Education Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Her family's financial troubles prevented EJP from receiving a formal or thorough education. In her own words, education was not within the reach of the gently born who were also poor, therefore I had little...
Education Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP ) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Textual Production Jean Plaidy
JP had begun writing some years before this first publication.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
During the 1930s she produced nine long novels, in which she tried to emulate her literary heroes (theBrontësEmily Brontë , George Eliot ,...
Reception Jean Plaidy
In 1991, JP said of Mistress of Mellyn: This was the sort of book that I loved to write, because I had read so much of the BrontësCharlotte BrontëAnne Brontë , over and over again, and...
Literary responses Jean Plaidy
Reviewers greeted this novel with praise, drawing parallels with Brontë 's Jane Eyre and Du Maurier 's Rebecca. Alex Stuart in John O' London's noted its utterly compulsive, drug-like, addictive quality.
Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert: "Queen of Romantic Suspense". http://members.tripod.com/jeanplaidy/index.htm.
Twenty years...
Family and Intimate relationships Adelaide Procter
AP was reportedly engaged for a time in the later 1850s, but the identity of her suitor is not known. Publisher George Smith records having admired her. He said that Charlotte Brontë , when they...
Textual Features Barbara Pym
Several critics have noted the influence on this novel of Charlotte Brontë .
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
86-90
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
41, 57
At the opening of this novel, Catherine's fashionable, modern appearance is said to be so stark that she looks...
Intertextuality and Influence Barbara Pym
In The Sweet Dove DiedBP deals with male homosexual relationships in connection with problems experienced by single women in their fifties. The name of the central character, Leonora Eyre, suggests Beethoven 's Leonora overtures...
Textual Production Jean Rhys
JR published her final, groundbreaking novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, in part a retelling of Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre.
Mellown, Elgin W. Jean Rhys: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Garland.
67
Sternlicht, Sanford. Jean Rhys. Twayne.
104
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Jean Rhys
JR 's Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre; it presents a significantly different perspective on the characters met in Brontë 's novel. The character Jane Eyre never appears at all, and...
Literary responses Jean Rhys
Later critics speak of the book as her masterpiece, and as a work of genius, praising its ground-breaking colonial and canonical critique. Coral Ann Howells comments that Wide Sargasso Sea has not only taken up...

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