Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Haworth context
- 2 'Our plays': The Brontë Juvenilia
- 3 The poetry
- 4 'Three distinct and unconnected tales': The Professor, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights
- 5 'Strong family likeness': Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- 6 Shirley and Villette
- 7 'Getting on': ideology, personality and the Brontë characters
- 8 Women writers, women's issues
- 9 The Brontës And Religion
- 10 The Brontë myth
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
1 - The Haworth context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Haworth context
- 2 'Our plays': The Brontë Juvenilia
- 3 The poetry
- 4 'Three distinct and unconnected tales': The Professor, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights
- 5 'Strong family likeness': Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- 6 Shirley and Villette
- 7 'Getting on': ideology, personality and the Brontë characters
- 8 Women writers, women's issues
- 9 The Brontës And Religion
- 10 The Brontë myth
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Most biographies begin, as Dickens in David Copperfield famously said they should, at the beginning: that is, with the birth of their subject. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, took a different view, dedicating the first two chapters of her Life of Charlotte Brontë not to Charlotte, nor even to her ancestry, but to the place where she grew up and spent most of her adult life. In this way, Gaskell set Haworth at the forefront of the Brontë story, deliberately linking place and subject in an exceptionally emphatic way. he explained why she did so quite candidly.
For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed, and from which both her own and her sisters’ first impressions of human life must have been received.
The reason why it was so necessary to do this is not immediately apparent to the modern reader, though it was obvious to Gaskell’s contemporaries. Jane Eyre had taken the literary world by storm when it appeared in 1847, but it was regarded in the terminology of the day as ‘a naughty book’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës , pp. 13 - 33Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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