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
After AB 's death, Charlotte considered her sister's novelhardly . . . desirable to preserve and the subject matter an entire mistake.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
274
She therefore concurred with her publisher's plan to reprint not this...
Literary responses Mary Cholmondeley
Most literary reviews were positive, some comparing MC to Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot ; The Spectator called the novel brilliant and exhilarating.
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, pp. 213-28.
214
An Edinburgh Review article written in 1900 praised Red Pottage in...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
Later reviewers have linked the confessional theme and High Church tendencies
Parkes, Bessie Rayner. In a Walled Garden. Ward and Downey.
104
of Ellen Middleton to its author's own conversion to Catholicism in 1846, two years after its publication. The Catholic World, for instance...
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 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 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...
Literary responses Marjorie Bowen
Although MB was commended for the accuracy of her historical settings in her crime novels, Mary Jean deMarr points out that she was also faulted for unbelievable reversals and obstrusive symbolism. However, deMarr finds her...
Literary responses Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE ...
Literary responses Hesba Stretton
Calling the novel an offspring of a bold imagination, the Athenæum comments that it is written without labour or spurious ornament, and that certain scenes are very well described.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2046 (1867): 44
Other reviewers compared...
Literary responses Annie Tinsley
The story was thought, however, to derive from other books, both from Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom's Cabin and from Charlotte Brontë 's Villette. In an Advertisement to her next, anonymous novel, AT
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 George Sand
Charlotte Brontë , signing as C. Bell, expressed to G. H. Lewes both praise and criticism for GS : It is poetry, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and...
Literary responses Lettice Cooper
Like Cooper's previous book, this too netted a flattering comparison to a nineteenth-century woman writer. Richard Church in John O'London's likened it to Charlotte Brontë 's Villette.
Cooper, Lettice. Fenny. Gollancz.
inside dust-jacket
The British Book News review...
Literary responses George Eliot
GE began to be remembered quite inaccurately as a humourless and self-righteous preacher, to whom invention was less important than exhortation.
Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. W.W. Norton.
xix
Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. Hamish Hamilton.
362
In 1895George Saintsbury , one of the shapers of English Literature...
Literary responses Elizabeth Rigby
Brontë also indulged in assumptions about gender and class in her reading of the critique. She wrote: I read The Quarterly without a pang, except that I thought there were some sentences disgraceful to the...

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