By Nava Atlas | On April 16, 2018 | Updated May 17, 2020 | Comments (2)
Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848) is best remembered for her haunting and passionate novel Wuthering Heights, but she has also been recognized as a brilliant poet. Among the three sisters, Emily Brontë’s poetry has been acknowledged as more skillful and moving than that of Charlotte or Anne.
In the mid-1840s, Charlotte discovered a stash of Emily’s poems and recognized the genius in them. She undertook the task of finding a home for a collaborative book of poems by herself and her two sisters.
The sisters took noms de plume — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne became Currer, Ellis, and Acton, respectively, and shared the faux surname Bell. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 15, 2018 | Updated July 31, 2020 | Comments (0)
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896) is often cited as this New England author’s most important work. Neither a novel nor traditional short stories, this book is rather a series of linked sketches of a fictional Maine seaport town called Dunnet Landing.
A quietly evocative writing style conveyed everyday events and quiet emotions, the joys as well as the inevitable losses and hardships experienced the people living in Maine’s coastal fishing villages. Crafting a portrait of a disappearing way of life with this book and the others that she wrote, Jewett helped popularize the genre of regionalism in fiction. Read More→
By Jill Fuller | On April 4, 2018 | Updated June 6, 2023 | Comments (1)
My first impression of Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853) was the familiarity of the writing — if I had no inclination of the author or book title, but merely “read it blind,” I think I would still know it was Charlotte Brontë. Character reigns supreme over the novel — that of the narrator, Lucy Snowe, as well as those around her.
The focus of the book lies primarily with the development of Lucy’s character. Because I had read Lyndall Gordon’s amazing biography of Charlotte beforehand, I felt prepared for Villette.
I read it with an eye for what it said about Charlotte — her life, her experiences, her opinions — and I think this colored my experience of it. Ultimately, it is a book in which the plot is only secondary. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 3, 2018 | Updated January 1, 2025 | Comments (0)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) is the British author, is best known for the 1818 classic, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. In the summer of 1814, seventeen-year-old Mary ran off to Europe with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
There she joined his literary circle, which included Lord Byron. The events that inspired the creation of the tale took place during the couple’s sojourn in Italy. It was published in 1818, when Mary was barely 21 years old.
Read in Mary Shelley’s own words how she came to write one of the most haunting tales of all time. Read More→
By Mary Ward | On February 23, 2018 | Updated August 24, 2020 | Comments (0)
The introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë is excerpted from Life and Works of the Sisters Brontë by Mary A. Ward, a 19th-century British novelist and literary critic. It’s not so much an analysis, but rather, places the novel in the context of Anne’s life.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, first published under Anne’s pseudonym Acton Bell, was an immediate success. It was considered shocking for its time, and in retrospect, it’s considered one of the earliest feminist novels.
When the novel was first published, reviews on both sides of the Atlantic identified it as the work of Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë‘s pseudonym), author of Jane Eyre, or Ellis Bell (actually Emily Brontë), author of Wuthering Heights, or both. It was common for the three sisters to be mistaken for one writer, which was quite vexing to them. Read More→
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