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 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 Hannah Lynch
Blackwood's Magazine introduced the serialization of this book with a half-promise of its being a clef: It is, we believe, the faithful narrative of an actual experience, the work of a powerful writer whose identity...
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 Anne Marsh
It was presumably the lightning that made Charlotte Brontë fear a charge of plagiarism when she read the tale following the publication of Jane Eyre.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Shelston, Alan, Penguin, 1975.
509
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 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...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
On 22 November 1848, Charlotte Brontë wrote to William Smith Williams (a friend of both herself and the author), I have read Madeleine. It is a fine pearl in simple setting. Julia Kavanagh has...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
Most reviews of North and South were positive, athough some criticized EG for what they saw as inaccuracies in her portrayal of northern industrial life. Chorley in the Athenæum called this one of the best...

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