MAE604-eL7 ,

IDOL Institute of Distance and Online Learning ENHANCE YOUR QUALIFICATION, ADVANCE YOUR CAREER.

2 M.A.English Early British Fiction Course Code: MAE 604 Semester: First e-Lesson: 6 SLM Unit: 7 www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) https://www.google.com/search?q=Greek+theatre All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

Women Novelist of Nineteenth 33 Century OBJECTIVES INTRODUCTION Student will be introduced to 19th Century Women In this unit we shall be able to understand 19th novelists century women novelists Student will be introduced to Charlotte Bronte as a Student will be able to understand social and 19th century novelist literary background of Bronte sisters as major writers of 19th century Student will be introduced to Anne Bronte as a 19th century novelist Student will be able to understand George Eliot as one of the 19th century novelists Student will be introduced to Emily Bronte as a 19th century novelist Student will be introduced to Emily Bronte as a 19th century novelist www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) INSTITUTE OF DAIlSlTAriNgChEt aArNeDreOsNeLrvINeEd LwEiAthRNCIUN-GIDOL

TOPICS TO BE COVERED 4 Literary and Social background of Charlotte Bronte Literary and Social background of Anne Bronte Literary and Social background of Emily Bronte Literary and Social background of George Eliot www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 5 Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. Born: 21 April 1816, Thornton, United Kingdom Died: 31 March 1855, Haworth, United Kingdom Nickname: Currer Bell Movies: Jane Eyre, Woman and Wife, Wide Sargasso Sea, Orphan of Lowood, Sangdil, Shirley, Shanti Nilayam www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books ...britannica.com All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 6 www.cuidol.in Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books ... All right are reserved with CU-IDOL britannica.com Unit-7 (MAE604)

CHARLOTTE BRONTE Charlotte Bronte:- 7 English novelist noted for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction. She later wrote Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Anglican clergyman. Irish-born, he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty. After serving in several parishes, he moved with his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë, and their six small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820, having been awarded a rectorship there. Soon after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three Charlotte Bronte | Biography, Books ... girls—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—and a boy, Branwell. britannica.com www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 8 In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before their deaths, attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh. Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps exaggeratedly) long years afterward in Jane Eyre, under the thin disguise of Lowood Institution, and its principal, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, has been accepted as the counterpart of Mister Brocklehurst in the novel. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 9 Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than five years the Brontë children learned and played there, writing and telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate moors. In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and that discovery led to the publication of a joint volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), or Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; the pseudonyms were assumed to preserve secrecy and avoid the special treatment that they believed reviewers accorded to women www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

CHARLOTTE BRONTE 10 The book was issued at their own expense. It received few reviews and only two copies were sold. Nevertheless, a way had opened to them, and they were already trying to place the three novels they had written. Charlotte failed to place The Professor: A Tale but had, however, nearly finished Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, begun in August 1846 in Manchester, where she was staying with her father, who had gone there for an eye operation. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

ANNE BRONTE The Anne Brontë, pseudonym Acton Bell, (born Jan. 17, 11 1820, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.—died May 28, 1849, Scarborough, Yorkshire), English poet and novelist, sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The youngest of six children of Patrick and Marie Brontë, Anne was taught in the family’s Haworth home and at Roe Head School. With her sister Emily, she invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, about which they wrote verse and prose (the latter now lost) from the early 1830s until 1845. She took a position as governess briefly in 1839 and then Anne Brontë - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org again for four years, 1841–45, with the Robinsons, the family All right are reserved with CU-IDOL of a clergyman, at Thorpe Green, near York. There her irresponsible brother, Branwell, joined her in 1843, intending to serve as a tutor. Anne returned home in 1845 and was followed shortly by her brother, who had been dismissed, charged with making love to his employer’s wife. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

ANNE BRONTE 12 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL In 1846 Anne contributed 21 poems to Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, a joint work with her sisters Charlotte and Emily. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published together with Emily’s Wuthering Heights in three volumes (of which Agnes Grey was the third) in December 1847. The reception to these volumes, associated in the public mind with the immense popularity of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (October 1847), led to quick publication of Anne’s second novel (again as Acton Bell), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in three volumes in June 1848; it sold well. She fell ill with tuberculosis toward the end of the year and died the following May. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

ANNE BRONTE 13 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL Her novel Agnes Grey, probably begun at Thorpe Green, records with limpidity and some humour the life of a governess. George Moore called it “simple and beautiful as a muslin dress.” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall presents an unsoftened picture of the debauchery and degradation of the heroine’s first husband and sets against it the Arminian belief, opposed to Calvinist predestination, that no soul shall be ultimately lost. Her outspokenness raised some scandal, and Charlotte deplored the subject as morbid and out of keeping with her sister’s nature, but the vigorous writing indicates that Anne found in it not only a moral obligation but also an opportunity of artistic development www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

EMILY BRONTE Emily Brontë, in full Emily Jane Brontë, pseudonym Ellis Bell, 14 (born July 30, 1818, Thornton, Yorkshire, England—died All right are reserved with CU-IDOL December 19, 1848, Haworth, Yorkshire), English novelist and poet who produced but one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a highly imaginative work of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire moors. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters, but the record of her life is extremely meagre, for she was silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest, and her single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual existence. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

EMILY BRONTE 15 Her father, Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Irishman, held a number of curacies: Hartshead-cum-Clifton, Yorkshire, was the birthplace of his elder daughters, Maria and Elizabeth (who died young), and nearby Thornton that of Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, and Anne. In 1820 their father became rector of Haworth, remaining there for the rest of his life. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

EMILY BRONTE 16 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL After the death of their mother in 1821, the children were left very much to themselves in the bleak moorland rectory. The children were educated, during their early life, at home, except for a single year that Charlotte and Emily spent at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. In 1835, when Charlotte secured a teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Emily accompanied her as a pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three months. In 1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill, near Halifax, and then resigned. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

EMILY BRONTE 17 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL To keep the family together at home, Charlotte planned to keep a school for girls at Haworth. In February 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management at the Pension Héger. Although Emily pined for home and for the wild moorlands, it seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated than Charlotte. Her passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte’s decorous temperament. In October, however, when her aunt died, Emily returned permanently to Haworth. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

EMILY BRONTE 18 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and this led to the discovery that all three sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne— had written verse. A year later they published jointly a volume of verse, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the initials of these pseudonyms being those of the sisters; it contained 21 of Emily’s poems, and a consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that Emily’s verse alone reveals true poetic genius. The venture cost the sisters about £50 in all, and only two copies were sold. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

EMILY BRONTE 19 By midsummer of 1847 Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey had been accepted for joint publication by J. Cautley Newby of London, but publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of their sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, which was immediately and hugely successful. Wuthering Heights, when published in December 1847, did not fare well; critics were hostile, calling it too savage, too animal- like, and clumsy in construction. Only later did it come to be considered one of the finest novels in the English language. Soon after the publication of her novel, Emily’s health began to fail rapidly. She had been ill for some time, but now her breathing became difficult, and she suffered great pain. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

GEORGE ELIOT 20 George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann, or Marian, Cross, née Evans, (born November 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England—died December 22, 1880, London), English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) The Guardian view on George Eliot: a theguardian.com All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

GEORGE ELIOT 21 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL She spent the winter of 1849–50 at Geneva, reading extensively while living with the family of François D’Albert Durade, who painted a portrait of her. Like those by Mrs. Bray (1842) and Sir Frederic Burton (1865), all in the National Portrait Gallery, it shows her with light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a very fair complexion. Returning to Coventry, she spent the rest of 1850 with the Brays, pondering how to live on the £100 a year left by her father. After John Chapman, the publisher of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, got her a chance to review R.W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect in The Westminster Review (January 1851), she decided to settle in London as a freelance writer, and in January 1851 she went to board with the Chapmans at 142, Strand www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

GEORGE ELIOT 22 At Weimar and Berlin she wrote some of her best essays for The Westminster and translated Spinoza’s Ethics (published in 1981), while Lewes worked on his groundbreaking life of Goethe. By his pen alone he had to support his three surviving sons at school in Switzerland as well as Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, which was continued until her death in 1902. She had four children by Hunt, the last born in 1857, all registered under Lewes’s name. The few friends who knew the facts agreed that toward Agnes his conduct was more than generous, but there was a good deal of malicious gossip about the “strong-minded woman” who had “run off with” her husband. Evans’s deepest regret was that her act isolated her from her family in Warwickshire. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

GEORGE ELIOT 23 She turned to early memories and, encouraged by Lewes, wrote a story about a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton parish. Published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1857) as The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, it was an instant success. Two more tales, Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story and Janet’s Repentance, also based on local events, appeared serially in the same year, and Blackwood republished all three as Scenes of Clerical Life, 2 vol. (1858), under the pseudonym George Eliot. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

GEORGE ELIOT Adam Bede, 3 vol. (1859), her first long novel, she described as “a 24 country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its All right are reserved with CU-IDOL masterly realism—“the faithful representing of commonplace things”— brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that John Ruskin was commending in the Pre-Raphaelites The book is rich in humour. The germ of the plot was an anecdote her Methodist aunt told of visiting a girl condemned for child murder. The dialect of the Bedes she had heard in the conversations of her Derbyshire uncles with her father, some of whose early experiences she assigned to Adam. But what was new in English fiction was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment. Adam Bede went through eight printings within a year, and Blackwood doubled the £800 paid for it and returned the copyright www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

GEORGE ELIOT In The Mill on the Floss, 3 vol. (1860), she returned again to the 25 scenes of her early life. The first half of the book, with its All right are reserved with CU-IDOL remarkable portrayal of childhood, is irresistibly appealing, and throughout there are scenes that reach a new level of psychological subtlety. George Eliot’s next two novels are laid in England at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill. In Felix Holt, the Radical, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the election riot from recollection of one she saw at Nuneaton in December 1832. The initial impulse of the book was not the political theme but the tragic character of Mrs. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

GEORGE ELIOT 26 All right are reserved with CU-IDOL The initial impulse of the book was not the political theme but the tragic character of Mrs. Transome, who was one of her greatest triumphs. The intricate plot popular taste then demanded now tells against the novel. Middlemarch (8 parts, 1871–72) is by general consent George Eliot’s masterpiece. Under her hand the novel had developed from a mere entertainment into a highly intellectual form of art. Every class of Middlemarch society is depicted from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, the shopkeepers, publicans, farmers, and labourers. Several strands of plot are interwoven to reinforce each other by contrast and parallel. Yet the story depends not on close-knit intrigue but on showing the incalculably diffusive effect of the unhistoric acts of those who “lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.” www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

GEORGE ELIOT The In 1863 the Leweses bought the Priory, 21, North 27 Bank, Regent’s Park, where their Sunday afternoons became a All right are reserved with CU-IDOL brilliant feature of Victorian life. There on November 30, 1878, Lewes died. For nearly 25 years he had fostered her genius and managed all the practical details of life, which now fell upon her. Most of all she missed the encouragement that alone made it possible for her to write. For months she saw no one but his son Charles Lee Lewes; she devoted herself to completing the last volume of his Problems of Life and Mind (1873–79) and founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604)

GEORGE ELIOT 28 For some years her investments had been in the hands of John Walter Cross (1840–1924), a banker introduced to the Leweses by Herbert Spencer. Cross’s mother had died a week after Lewes. Drawn by sympathy and the need for advice, George Eliot soon began to lean on him for affection too. On May 6, 1880, they were married in St. George’s, Hanover Square. Cross was 40; she was in her 61st year. After a wedding trip in Italy they returned to her country house at Witley before moving to 4, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where she died in December. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS 29 1. When was Charlote Bronte born? c) 21 April 1707 a) 21 April 1816 d) 15 April 1705 b) 20 April 1707 c) 5 Oct.1750 2. When was Anne Bronte born? d) 17 Jan. 1820 a) 4 Oct.1753 b) 2 Oct. 1750 c) 1820 d)1818 3. When was Emily Bronte born? a) 1816 c) 1813 b) 1815 d)1819 4.When was George Eliot born? a) 1812 b) 1814 Answers: 1.a) 2. d) 3. d) 4. d) www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

SUMMARY 30 The Bronte sisters turned out to be the major writers/novelists of the 19th century Bronte was a 19th century literary family They are well known as poets and novelists of 19th century They published their poems and novels under male pseudonyms:-Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell Their works attracted the readers’ attention for their passion and originality www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) Summary Writing All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 31 1.Q. Discuss Jane Eyre as a major work of the 19th century. 2.Q. Discuss the plot and characterization of Jane Eyre. 3.Q Discuss The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a major work of the 19th century. 4.Q Discuss the plot and characterization of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 5.Q Discuss Wuthering Heights as a major work of the 19th century. 6.Q Discuss the plot and characterization of Wuthering Heights. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions ... All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

REFERENCES 32 Category:19th-century English novelists – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Category:19th- century_Engli.. Category:19th-century novelists – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Category:19th-century_novel.. Category:19th-century British novelists – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Category:19th-century_Britis. www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL

33 THANK YOU www.cuidol.in Unit-7 (MAE604) All right are reserved with CU-IDOL