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
Literary responses Emily Spender
The Athenæum reviewer, Almaric Rumsey , guessed the novelist's gender from the use of the bigamy motif, which he felt to be obviously derivative from more talented novelists (Wilkie Collins 's recently published The...
Literary responses Elizabeth Robins
The young Virginia Stephen (usually a reviewer hard to please) praised this book warmly: few living novelists are so genuinely gifted as Miss Robins, or can produce work to match hers for strength and sincerity...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
Charlotte Brontë wrote to CG to voice her admiration: not the echo of another mind—the pale reflection of a reflection—but the result of original observation, and faithful delineation from actual life.
qtd. in
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
129
Edward Copeland finds...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
On 4 July 1846 two anonymous reviews of Poems by Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell appeared, one mildly positive by Sydney Dobell in the Athenæum, and one enthusiastic in the Critic. A...
Literary responses Rebecca Harding Davis
The book was initially well-received. A reviewer for the mostly female-oriented Peterson's Magazine, for instance, declared that [o]n some of the deepest problems that agitate humanity [RHD ] has evidently thought much and...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
EG called this work simply a little country love story,
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
251
although it climaxes with a fire and a shipwreck. Charlotte Brontë liked it, and Mary Forster recorded her brother Matthew Arnold 's enjoyment of...
Literary responses Fanny Aikin Kortright
This novel was reviewed for the Athenæum by Horace St John , who placed FAKunmistakeably in the school of Currer Bell ,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1550 (1857): 881
and somewhat heartlessly maintained that the sister heroines, in...
Literary responses Matilda Betham-Edwards
Geraldine Jewsbury , reviewing this book for the Athenæum early the next year, was not exactly encouraging. She guessed the author's gender correctly, and judged the novel a pale imitation of Charlotte Brontë 's Jane...
Literary responses Jessie Fothergill
The Spectator reviewer admitted to surprise at this novel, since whereas The First Violin and Probation were clever and interesting, it found little, if anything, in them to lead us to expect that their author...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
H. F. Chorley , the Athenæum reviewer, lauded it as an excellent story for young people, sound in morals and pleasant in incident,—with only one passing apparition of the Deus ex machina to disturb our...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
Around the time of Ruth's appearance, Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer (who was probably introduced to EG by William and Mary Howitt ) wrote: Dear Elizabeth, dear sister in spirit, if I may...
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...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The novel prompted a complimentary letter on 7 November 1849 from Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë ) saying that in it he tasted a new and keen pleasure, and experienced a genuine benefit. In his...
Literary responses Matilda Betham-Edwards
The Athenæum review by Lena Eden professed itself disgusted not so much by Dr Jacob's hypocritical and despicable character as by his gall in presuming to set himself up as a hero at an age...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
The novel was reviewed immediately by The Spectator and the Athenæum. The former accused the author of a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal, and objected to the coarseness of...

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