Charlotte Bronte: jane eyre
"To you I am neither a man nor a woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me- the sole ground on which I accept your judgement." - Charlotte Bronte, to a critic (Oates, V) Charlotte Brontė's reputation may be explained in part by the astounding success of her first novel, Jane Eyre; it owes much also to the romantic appeal of her personal history, given prominence soon after her death by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's excellent biography. Of greater importance are her explorations of emotional repression and the feminine psyche introduced a new depth and intensity to the study of character and motive in fiction. Charlotte Brontė was not in any formal sense a proponent of women's rights, but in her writing she speaks out strongly against the injustices suffered by women in a society that restricts their freedom of action and exploits their dependent status. Her protests grew out of her own experience, which provided much of the material for her fiction. She once insisted that "we only suffer reality to Suggest, never to dictate,"("Charlotte Bronte...", 9). Her novels include many characters and incidents recognizably drawn from her life, and her heroines have much
In the course of his study, Bayne accords Charlotte pride of place among the Brontė sisters because she had "ten times more power" than Anne and a nature with more geniality and culture than Emily's (37). Later critics have moved in a different direction, finding Emily to be the greater writer. The stark and mythopoeic qualities of Wuthering Heights undeniably reflect a genius and a vision beyond Charlotte's capacities. Yet Emily's enigmatic romance, unique of its kind, was a dead end in English fiction, whereas the painful realism of Charlotte's studies of the human heart gave a fresh impetus and a new direction to the genre of the novel. Charlotte Brontė was born on April 21, 1816 at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Her father, Patrick Brontė, a native of County Down in Ireland, had risen above the poverty of his family to become an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, and in 1807 was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In 1812 he met, courted, and married Maria Branwell, a pious and educated young woman from Cornwall. Their life together was tragically brief; Maria bore six children in seven years, then died of cancer in 1821 at the age of thirty-eight. The early loss of their mother had a lasting effect on the children, particularly Charlotte; all her published novels are concerned in one way or another with young women who must lead a lonely path through life without the warmth and security of parental love. Her mother's death may have been hastened by the family's move in 1820 from Thornton to Haworth, where Mr. Brontė had been appointed perpetual curate. Beautiful as the landscape might be around Haworth, physical conditions in this rugged little mill town must have been harsh and unpleasant for the parson's delicate wife. Sanitation in Haworth was primitive; as late as 1850 a government inspector found open sewers and overflowing cesspits on the main street, next to outlets for drinking water. It is hardly surprising that infant mortality rates in Haworth were high or that there were frequent outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. Throughout her life, Charlotte Brontė was to suffer from fevers, colds, and bilious attacks undoubtedly attributable to this most inhospitable environment. Nor was there much consolation to be found in the society of Haworth. Its inhabitants, even thirty years later, struck Mrs. Gaskell as a "wild, rough population" among whom there was "little display of any of the amenities of life"(127, 168). There was little social contact between the townsfolk and the family at the parsonage; the Brontė children thusly turned to one another for
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Approximate Word count = 1760
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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