ABOUT CHARLOTTE BRONTE
Marked by grief, obscurity, and determination, Charlotte Bronte's life closely resembles that of her most famous heroine. Left motherless at an early age, Charlotte, her brother, and her four sisters were raised in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, where their father was curate. Charlotte's two older sisters died of illnesses contracted at the Cowan Bridge boarding school, which Charlotte also attended and which she used as the basis for Lowood in Jane Eyre. At nine, she became the eldest of the four surviving siblings. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, along with their brother, Branwell, read voraciously and created an elaborate fantasy world. The four wrote prolifically, in preparation for the later literary efforts of the three sisters. Charlotte attended school, worked for a time as a teacher, and had a brief career as a governess. In 1842, she and Emily went to Brussels to study languages. Charlotte's teacher there was the charismatic M. Heger, a married man with whom she fell in love. Her emotionally fraught, though celibate, relationship with him served as the basis for her first novel, The Professor. Written in 1846, it was not published until after her death.
In 1845, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Though it sold virtually no copies, the sisters continued to write under these male pseudonyms, and, in 1847, Charlotte published Jane Eyre, which was a resounding popular success. Both Branwell and Emily died in 1848, with Anne following the next year. Charlotte went on to publish Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). In 1854, she married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, but soon died during pregnancy.
An Online Library of Literature
Your students can read this wonderful book online.
http://www.literature.org/authors/bronte-charlotte/jane-eyre/
Novel Guide
You will find a novel summary, character profiles, metaphor analysis, and theme analysis here.
http://www.novelguide.com/janeeyre/
The Victorian Web
A wealth of links to everything Victorian on the Web: literature, science, music, art, technology.
http://65.107.211.206/victov.html
Charlotte Bronte Biography
http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/bronte-c/bronte-c1.htm
Shirley: A Tale (1849)
Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.
The Professor: A Tale (1857)
Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Bronte's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Bronte's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.
Villette (1853)
Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette, flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucy's struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Bronte's strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free.
