By Nava Atlas | On November 17, 2021 | Updated August 20, 2026 | Comments (0)
Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney (2021) is a richly imagined novel about the wedding and subsequent Irish honeymoon of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols, the curate who worked with her father at Haworth parsonage.
This illuminating narrative is based on meticulous research by Ms. Clooney, an award-winning short story writer and the founding director of Kildare Writing Centre in Ireland. This is her first full-length novel.
The novel focuses on a little-known time in Charlotte’s life. Though she’s a celebrated author at home and abroad, the siblings she grew up with (Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë) all died several years earlier, leaving only Charlotte and her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, from a family that once numbered eight members. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On November 15, 2021 | Updated June 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
How is it that Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was laid to rest in the seaside town of Scarborough, England, and not in Haworth, the enclave in the Yorkshire moors where the others in her immediate family were buried?
Here we’ll explore how Anne came to be connected with Scarborough, and how she came to be buried there.
The youngest of the literary Brontë sisters, Anne was often described as the gentlest and quietest of the trio, which included Charlotte and Emily. The career of this talented writer was cut short, as she was only twenty-nine when she died of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) in 1849. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On November 12, 2021 | Updated August 31, 2025 | Comments (0)
The Brontë fanfiction canon isn’t as voluminous as the fanfic genre dedicated to Jane Austen. The Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—between them wrote just seven finished novels in their short lifetimes, but the lasting impact they’ve had on world literature can’t be overstated.
For a time, the sisters feared they’d never get published, so arduous was their path to publication. But they, or rather, Charlotte, persevered, on behalf of not only herself, but her sisters.
The sisters lived to see their major works published in the 1840s, though under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to obfuscate their genders. These were Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley; Emily’s Wuthering Heights; and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte’s first novel written with the intent to publish, The Professor, came out posthumously, in 1857.
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By Marta McDowell | On November 1, 2021 | Updated December 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
In Unearthing the Secret Garden, Marta McDowell pays homage to the enduring classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett that has enthralled generations of readers.
Through the universal metaphor of garden cultivation, The Secret Garden conveys a message of hope, and the renewal of the life as well as the self.
The Secret Garden introduced the reader to an unlikely heroine, Mary Lennox, a sickly and neglected 10-year-old born to wealthy British parents in colonial India. After a cholera epidemic kills her parents, Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle in a mysterious house. Read More→
By Rochelle Melander | On October 13, 2021 | Updated June 9, 2024 | Comments (2)
Jan Morris (October 2, 1926 – November 20, 2020), the historian and travel writer, was born and mostly raised in England, but identified as Welsh. Renowned for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, she was also esteemed for her intimate and insightful portraits of several great cities of the world.
Jan published under her birth name, James, before completing her transition to female in 1972. She was one of the first public figures to come out openly as transgender, making her a pioneer to the generations of trans writers (and others) who came after her.
This introduction to the ideas and accomplishments of Jan Morris is excerpted from Mightier Than the Sword; Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries Who Changed the World Through Writing by Rochelle Melander, illustrated by Melina Ontiveros. Copyright © 2021 Beaming Books. Reproduced by permission. Read More→
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