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.
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
Textual Features Adrienne Rich
AR 's delineation of a lesbian continuum . . . of woman-identified experience
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Norton, 1986.
51
became one of her most controversial and influential theories. Rejecting established definitions of lesbianism as pathology, she means to acknowledge the...
Textual Features Phyllis Bentley
Set (like its successors) in the fictional valley of the Ire (based on the Colne Valley) in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Inheritance follows five generations of three families involved in the cloth...
Textual Features Dinah Mulock Craik
Freed as a disabled woman from the expectations of conventional femininity, Olive leads an independent life and struggles to become a successful painter, strengthened by her reading of Shelley and Byron . But she foregoes...
Textual Features Elizabeth Robins
It presents, in a light and humorous tone, three models of writing women: Charlotte Brontë as a genius of the past, speaking from beyond the grave (or perhaps being fraudulently made to speak); a Victorian...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
Textual Features Jane Austen
The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...
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, 1992.
86-90
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
41, 57
At the opening of this novel, Catherine's fashionable, modern appearance is said to be so stark that she looks...
Textual Features Ruby M. Ayres
Dark Gentleman carries an unascribed epigraph from Caroline Norton : Until I truly loved—I was alone.
Ayres, Ruby M. Dark Gentleman. Hodder and Stoughton, 1953.
title-page
Its title is the name given by Judith Anson to Simon Trenchard, with whom at last she achieves...
Textual Features Mary Taylor
In essence, Miss Miles presents and evaluates four case studies of young middle-class women struggling to earn and enjoy a living. Sarah's Aunt Jane details the obstacles facing working women: There's no decent way fit...
Textual Features Flora Macdonald Mayor
While spinsters are again perceived as lonely, self-pitying, garrulous, defensive
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
4223 (9 March 1984): 238
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
Textual Features Eliza Lynn Linton
The novel, like the much earlier Grasp Your Nettle, features an off-stage Brontë esque mad wife.
Sanders, Valerie, and Eliza Lynn Linton. “Appendix F: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Canon”. The Rebel of the Family, edited by Deborah T. Meem and Deborah T. Meem, Broadview, 2002, pp. 475-87.
479
Textual Features Caroline Clive
In a preface CC addresses criticism of her previous work, Paul Ferroll. She writes: The opinions of the Public are like Fate. An Author may loudly declare them unjust, but he does not alter...
Textual Features Violet Hunt
VH modifies the gothic here to explore the psychological strains felt by sexually-frustrated women. Marie Secor finds a Charlotte Brontë -ish quality
Secor, Marie. “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction”. English Literature in Transition, Vol.
19
, 1976, pp. 25-34.
27
introduced into Hunt's writing with this work. Secor also notes that its...
Textual Features Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.