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In this volume we share Charlotte Bronte's experience for four crucial years. The success of Jane Eyre and the strange power of Wuthering Heights made the 'brothers Bell' the 'universal theme of conversation'; but privately the family endured the deaths of Branwell Bronte in September andEmily in December 1848, followed by Anne's in May 1849. Haunted by the fear that she also would succumb, Charlotte found salvation in writing Shirley, published in October 1849, and comfort in her friendship and correspondence with Ellen Nussey, with her publishers-especially George Smith-with MrsGaskell, and (for a time) Harriet Martineau. She may also have received a proposal of marriage from Smith, Edler's manager, James Taylor.
Despite Charlotte Brontë's entreaty to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey to burn her correspondence, very little seems to have been destroyed, and in this fully annotated edition, based as far as possible on original manuscripts, many confidential and outspoken letters are published in full for the first time. As well as Charlotte's own letters from 1829 to 1847, a handful of important letters and diary extracts by her friends and family illuminate the writer's correspondence. This volume covers the period from her childhood up to the publication and review of Jane Eyre.
"A fresh and modern view of Charlotte Bronte--as a woman searching for love and as a writer who helped change society's perceptions about her sex. Her moving, eloquent portrait will interest not only Bronte devotees but all contemporary women."--Kirkus Reviews
The lives of literary figures have always provided a source of fascination; the tragic life of Charlotte Brontë is no different. In this interpretive critical biography, Helene Moglen "takes for granted earlier, exhaustive studies" done on Brontë to produce an analysis that incorporates not only the facts of her life, but also their influence upon her works. Through her study, Moglen seeks to examine the two dimensions that are essential to any study of Brontë the life she lived and the life she created within the pages of fiction. By examining the paradoxical personal tragedy and artistic fulfillment that made up Charlotte Brontë's life, Helen Moglen shows the evolution of Brontë's feminism. Through Brontë's growth, Moglen then is able to "explore explicitly formations of the modern female psyche." Considered to be a major biography fusing together the making of literature and the formation of personality, Moglen offers a new critical insight into Brontë's struggle for self-definition and how it can be reflected through the lives of readers more than a century later.
A groundbreaking biography that places an obsessive, unrequited love at the heart of the writer's life story, transforming her from the tragic figure we have previously known into a smoldering Jane Eyre. Famed for her beloved novels, Charlotte Brontë has been known as well for her insular, tragic family life. The genius of this biography is that it delves behind this image to reveal a life in which loss and heartache existed alongside rebellion and fierce ambition. Harman seizes on a crucial moment in the 1840s when Charlotte worked at a girls' school in Brussels and fell hopelessly in love with the husband of the school's headmistress. Her torment spawned her first attempts at writing for publication, and he haunts the pages of every one of her novels--he is Rochester in Jane Eyre, Paul Emanuel in Villette. Another unrequited love--for her publisher--paved the way for Charlotte to enter a marriage that ultimately made her happier than she ever imagined. Drawing on correspondence unavailable to previous biographers, Claire Harman establishes Brontë as the heroine of her own story, one as dramatic and triumphant as one of her own novels.
'If men could see us as we really are, they would be amazed', wrote Charlotte Brontë, the outwardly conventional parson's daughter who had rarely met any men beyond those of the church or classroom by the time Jane Eyre was published in 1847. From the landscape of the Yorkshire moors, an appalling childhood and a family decimated by consumption, Jane Eyre came as an instant literary sensation. It also brought Charlotte Brontë the notoriety that was to remain with her for the rest of her short and tragic life. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's first biographer, attempted to clear Charlotte of the charges of passionate immorality that were levelled at a woman author - and an unmarried one at that. Rebecca Fraser, 130 years later, placed Charlotte's life within the perceptual framework of contemporary attitudes to women. Her biography is an invaluable contribution to Brontë scholarship, which shares her admiration for a woman prepared to stand out against some of the cruelest Victorian ideas about her sex.