Charlotte Bront?, Juvenilia, 1829–1835, ed. Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 1996)
Letters
The Letters of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Margaret Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, 2000)
Life
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Elisabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1997)
Madwoman in the Attic
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Princeton: Yale University Press, 2000).
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
PL
John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1999)
PP
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Poems of Byron
Lord Byron, The Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)
Poems of CB
The Poems of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Tom Winnifrith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)
Poems of Keats
John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988)
Poems of Pope
Alexander Pope, The Poems, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963)
WH
Emily Bront?, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, preface by Lucasta Miller (London: Penguin, revd edn 2003)
All references to the Bible are to the Authorized Version. Translations are from French unless otherwise indicated.
[TITLE-PAGE]
1. An Autobiography … Currer Bell: In a letter of 12 September 1847, Charlotte Bront? accepted her publisher George Smith’s suggestion that ‘it would be much better to add the words “an autobiography”’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 540). The wording was dropped in the second and third editions, where the words ‘EDITED BY CURRER BELL’ were altered to ‘BY CURRER BELL’. Because the fictional autobiography, a form rooted in the confessional tradition of Puritan testament, offers its reader an aesthetic of inwardness, veracity and intimacy, many contemporary reviewers responded to the novel as an autobiography. In the preface to the 1850 edition of WH Charlotte Bront? explains the Bront?s’ adoption of ambiguously gendered pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell), as a means of covering up their female gender, in the awareness that ‘authoresses were looked on with prejudice’ (‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, Preface to WH, p. lxiv).
INTRODUCTION
For abbreviations, see Abbreviation.
1. Annie Thackeray Ritchie, ‘My Witches’ Cauldron’, Macmillan’s Magazine 63 (February 1890), in CA, Vol. I, p. 124.
2. George Smith, ‘Charlotte Bront?’, Cornhill Magazine (July– December 1900), in CA, Vol. I, pp. 137–8.
3. Frederick Harrison, Charlotte Bront?, Studies in Early Victorian Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1895), in CA, Vol. I, p. 251.
4. William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘The Last Sketch’, Cornhill Magazine 1 (January–June 1860), in CA, Vol. I, p. 86.
5. Charlotte Bront?, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ (1850), printed in WH, p. xliv.
6. George Henry Lewes, review of Jane Eyre, Fraser’s Magazine 36 (December 1847), in CA, Vol. III, pp. 14, 12.
7. Reported by George Smith, ‘Charlotte Bront?’, in CA, Vol. I, p. 146.
8. Ibid., p. 147.
9. Elizabeth Rigby, review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, Quarterly Review (December 1848), in CA, Vol. I, pp. 33–61.
10. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), 3 vols. (London: Virago, 1983), Vol. II, p. 324.
11. Charlotte Bront?, letter of 8 June 1839 to Emily Bront?, Letters, Vol. I, p. 191.
12. Rigby, CA, Vol. I, p. 51.
13. The Chartist movement, so called because of their ‘People’s Charter’ of 1838, devised by William Lovett, was a working-class movement campaigning through the late 1830s and 1840s for social and political reform, with the issue of universal male suffrage at its core. Giant petitions to Parliament culminated in the monster petition of 1848, carrying six million signatures.
14. The European revolutions of 1848 were the result of a combination of bourgeois pressure for liberal reform and a severe economic downturn, combined with crop failure, which created famine and unrest. The revolutions were rapidly suppressed, with great violence on the part both of the governments and the rebels.
15. Anonymous review, Christian Remembrancer 15 (April 1848), in CA, Vol. I, p. 18.
16. Rigby, CA, Vol. I, p. 51.
17. Margaret Oliphant, ‘Modern Novelists – Great and Small’, Blackwood’s Magazine 77 (May 1855), pp. 557–8.
18. Ibid., p. 558.
19. Barker, pp. 554–5.
20. Anonymous, ‘Queen Bees or Worker Bees?’ Saturday Review 8 (12 November 1859), pp. 576, 575.
21. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), printed in full in Selected Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 199.
22. David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London: Allen Lane, 1965), p. 112.
23. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), pp. 243–61.
24. Charlotte Bront?, Letter of 4 January 1848 to W. S. Williams, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 3–4.
25. For example, the Chartist leader, William Lovett in in his autobiography, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (London: Trübner, 1876), p. 55.
26. Charlotte Bront?, Letter of 24 July 1844 to Constantin Heger, Letters, Vol.