Read the Other Charlotte

The How To: Academy talk series organised by The Telegraph has scheduled a Brontë talk for today, January 18:

18.01.2014:  10am-5pm
how to: Read the Other Charlotte Brontë
with Lucy Hughes-Hallett
The Private Room, Waterstones Piccadilly

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s first masterpiece, is one of the most popular of all the great 19th century English novels. Her other masterpieces, Villette, Shirley, and The Professor are comparatively unknown.


In this intensive day seminar you will meet the Charlotte Brontë we rarely see. You will read passages you have never read before, hear about the Brontë myth, and the way Charlotte Brontë became a literary celebrity.
You will consider her work’s roots in Gothic fantasy, its long-lasting influence on subsequent fiction, and its appropriation by 20th century feminists.


The core of the course, though, will consist of analysis – in which you will be encouraged to participate – of some of the novels’ pivotal passages, such as the hallucinatory scenes in Villette when the heroine’s rigid self-control breaks down and Brontë’s prose takes off into forms as vivid and strange as any latter-day experimentalist’s. For those who already know Brontë’s works, this course provides an opportunity to explore how she achieves her extraordinary effects. Those coming to them new will be introduced to an oeuvre in which the revolutionary and the romantic are thrillingly combined.


Further Reading:
Villette, ed. Helen Cooper (Penguin)
Villette, introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Everyman)
The Professor, ed. Heather Glen (Penguin)
Shirley, ed. Lucasta Miller (Penguin)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Penguin)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale)
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, by Lyndall Gordon (Little Brown)