Brontë

From Free net encyclopedia

The Brontë Template:IPA sisters—Charlotte (born April 21, 1816), Emily (born July 30, 1818), and Anne (born January 17, 1820), were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature.

They grew up Haworth, Yorkshire, surviving their mother and two elder sisters into adulthood. Educated largely at home by their father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, Charlotte and Emily completed their education in Brussels before finding teaching posts in England.

They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies, and they returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after a long search to secure a publisher. The novels attracted great critical attention and steadily became bestsellers, but the sisters' careers were shortened by ill-health. Emily died the following year before she could complete another novel, and Anne published her second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848 a year before her death. Charlotte's Shirley appeared in 1849 and was followed by Villette in 1853. Her first novel The Professor was published posthumously in 1857, as she had died in 1855, and so was her uncompleted work, Emma in 1860.

The first biography of Charlotte was written by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell and published in 1857, which helped create the mythic status of a doomed family in romantic solitude.

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