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.
Focusing particularly on the critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes offers in-depth examinations of reviews by eight female critics: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. What they wrote about women writers, and what their writings tell us about the critics' own sense of themselves as women writers, reveal the distinctive character of nineteenth-century women's contributions to literary history. Wilkes explores the different choices these critics, writing when women had to grapple with limiting assumptions about female intellectual capacities, made about how to disseminate their own writing. While several publishing in periodicals wrote anonymously, others published books, articles and reviews under their own names. Wilkes teases out the distinctiveness of nineteenth-century women's often ignored contributions to the critical reception of canonical women authors, and also devotes space to the pioneering efforts of Lawrance, Kavanagh and Williams to draw attention to the long tradition of female literary activity up to the nineteenth century. She draws on commentary by male critics of the period as well, to provide context for this important contribution to the recuperation of women's critical discourse in nineteenth-century Britain.
This special edition of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës commemorates the bicentenary of Emily Brontë's birth in July 1818 and provides comprehensive and detailed information about the lives, works, and reputations of the Brontës - the three sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, their father, and their brother Branwell. Expanded entries surveying the Brontës' lives and works are supplemented by entries on friends and acquaintances, pets, literary and political heroes; on the places they knew and the places they imagined; on their letters, drawings and paintings; on historical events such as Chartism, the Peterloo Massacre, and the Ashantee Wars; on exploration, slavery, and religion. Selected entries on the characters and places in the Brontë juvenilia provide a glimpse into their early imaginative worlds, and entries on film, ballet, and musicals indicate the extent to which their works have inspired others. A new foreword to the text has been also penned by Claire Harman, award-winning writer and literary critic, and recent biographer of Charlotte Brontë. This is a unique and authoritative reference book for the research student and the general reader. The A-Z format, extensive cross-referencing, classified contents, chronologies, illustrations, and maps, both facilitate quick reference and encourage further exploration. This Companion is not only invaluable for quick searches, but a delight to browse, and an inspiration to further reading.