early stages of pregnancy. 4 April: Charlotte is buried in the family vault at Haworth.
1857 March: Publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bront?. June: The Professor, A Tale by Currer Bell is published for the first time.
1860 ‘Emma’, Charlotte’s last, unfinished work, is published in the Cornhill Magazine.
1861 7 June: Death of Patrick Bront?.
Further Reading
WRITINGS BY THE BRONT? SISTERS
Bront?, Anne, Agnes Grey, ed. Angeline Goreau (London: Penguin, 1988). This novel, completed before Charlotte Bront? began writing Jane Eyre, influenced her use of female first-person narrative and the treatment of a physically plain heroine.
——, The Poems of Anne Bront?: A New Text and Commentary, ed. Edward Chitham (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979). These poems reflect many of Charlotte Bront?’s Calvinist concerns.
——, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 1996). The treatment of feminist themes and the Byronic anti-hero in the person of Arthur Huntingdon is apposite to a reading of Jane Eyre.
Bront?, Charlotte, Juvenilia, 1829–1835, ed. Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 1996). The delightful early works show the emergence of the colonial and amorous themes as well as the Gothic manner.
——, The Letters of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Margaret Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, 2000). These magnificent letters illuminate both the conception, the creation and the process of publication of Jane Eyre.
——, The Poems of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Tom Winnifrith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Though an indifferent versifier, Charlotte Bront? draws on her poetry in Jane Eyre.
—— and Bront?, Emily, The Belgian Essays, ed. and tr. Sue Lonoff (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). The French essays Charlotte Bront? composed in Brussels contain material essential to an understanding of her unique intellectual gifts and resources.
Bront?, Emily, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, preface by Lucasta Miller (London: Penguin, revd edn 2003). Emily Bront?’s masterpiece had an immense effect on the composition of Jane Eyre.
——, The Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992). These poems express many of the themes and concerns (moonlit scenes, ‘mother nature’, inner strife, bird symbolism) that preoccupy Jane Eyre.
BIOGRAPHY
Barker, Juliet, The Bront?s (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). An indispensable companion to study of the Bront?s’ lives, especially in relation to contemporary local and national history, topography and political movements. It is detailed and nuanced, though it must be admitted that it seems prejudiced against Charlotte and overplays the roles of her father and brother.
Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Bront?, ed. Elisabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1997). This powerful and poignant testament to a loved fellow-writer shocked the public by exposing the closeness of Charlotte’s work to the Bront?s’ private experience.
Gordon, Lyndall, Charlotte Bront?: A Passionate Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). Recommended for its lucid, readable style and sensitive insight into Charlotte Bront?’s securing of a space for herself, under the stress of social and gender pressures, to live and write her own truth.
CRITICISM
Alexander, Christine (ed.), The Early Writings of Charlotte Bront? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). This entertaining and thoughtful book considers the unfolding of Charlotte Bront?’s imagination.
—— and Jane Sellars (eds.), The Art of the Bront?s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Charlotte Bront?’s pictorial art, together with lucid and helpful commentary, helps readers to focus visually on the pictorial elements of Jane Eyre.
Azim, Firdous, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). This work incorporates an invaluable summary of the modern arguments in relation to slavery and sexuality in Jane Eyre.
Chase, Karen, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Bront?, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (New York and London: Methuen, 1984). Wearing her considerable learning with admirable lightness, Chase discusses the complex spatial model of the mind in Jane Eyre.
Eagleton, Terry, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bront?s (London: Macmillan, 1975; 2nd edn, 1987). The social and political cruxes of Jane Eyre are vigorously examined in this readable work, the ‘gender blindness’ of which the author addresses in the preface to the second edition.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Princeton: Yale University Press, 2000). This is a classic feminist reading of the Bront?s in relation to their age and their inversion of traditional creeds.
Glen, Heather (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Bront?s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). This is an excellent introduction to the sisters’ lives and work, with contributions from leading experts.
——, ‘Jane Eyre’, New Casebook Series (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997). A valuable collection of modern critical essays and chapters from significant books, with a helpful and specific introduction. This volume is especially helpful in enabling the reader to address issues of colonialism and feminism.
McNees, Eleanor (ed.), The Bront? Sisters: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (East Sussex: Helm Information, 1996). An invaluable reprinting of otherwise inaccessible texts on the Bront?s from the Victorian era to the present day.
Miller, Lucasta, The Bront? Myth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). This penetrating and skilfully written work shows how the ‘Bront? industry’ and the myths that Charlotte Bront? herself initiated have affected the reading experience of Bront? literature.
Peters, Margot, Charlotte Bront?: Style in the Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). This synthesis of linguistic objective analysis with intuitive close reading has never been bettered.
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront? to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). This accessible and intelligent study places the Bront? sisters within a feminist tradition.
——, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). This well-written work demonstrates how cultural ideas about appropriate female behaviour have shaped the medical ‘science’ of psychiatry in relation to women: it is particularly apposite to the treatment of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Shuttleworth, Sally, Charlotte Bront? and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This magisterial work combines close textual analysis with an understanding of the ideology and implications of Victorian science, applying the physiological and phrenological preoccupations of the period to Charlotte Bront?’s work.
Stoneman, Patsy, Bront? Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ (London, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996). A comprehensive overview, with perceptive comment, on the way generations of readers transform texts into new shapes.
Taylor, Jenny Bourne and Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). An anthology of seminal texts which aids understanding of the model of the mind exemplified in Charlotte’s works.