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.
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...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
Some sources say that PS
attended a secondary modern school in Staines (that is one with non-academic aims and expectations). But attendance at a private school is strongly implied by her poem about a girls'...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
When her savings ran out, she left university and by the next year she was teaching again in Belmont, P.E.I. Among the influential books she read in the next few years were Olive Schreiner
's...
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
Margaret Forster
As a very small child MF
was noisy and demanding and given to tantrums.
Forster, Margaret. Hidden Lives. Viking.
121-2
At two she talked in long sentences . . . and never stopped asking questions and wanting to try to...
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
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...
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...
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...
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
.
