Becoming a Writer and the Characterization of Women

Some new recent scholar publications:

Teaching Crossroads: 15th and 16th IPB Erasmus Weeks

Instituto Politécnico de Bragança

Edited by Elisabete Mendes Silva, Clarisse Pais, Luis S. Pais

ISBN: 978-972-745-283-5

Includes the chapter:

Becoming a Writer – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë by Tatjana Šepić

In the field of juvenilia, the early writings of the four Brontës, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, occupy a particular place. Their childhood games produced shared imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal that became the poetic space from which their individual adult works would be created. In this paper we propose to follow these gifted children in their development from the child writer into the adult writer, and the multiple influences that shaped their literary tastes and inspired their first atttempts at writing, from the influence of their family, books and periodicals they read to intellectual and artistic stimuli that came from the context in which they grew up. We are also going to discuss the autobiographical, intra- and intertextual affiliations between their juvenile writings and their mature works, together with the phenomenon of the Brontë myth that continues to develop today. 

The Characterization of ‘Woman’ in Pamela by Samuel Richardson and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 

by İ̇smet Toksöz

Eurasian Journal of English Language and Literature, Volume 2, Issue 2,  Pages 129 - 137, 2020

The effects of feminist ideas and movements were seen in English literature differently in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. ‘Feminist sensibility’ and the perception of ‘woman’ in the society were different in these three centuries. Feminism as an idea was born in the eighteenth century; and, its waves took their final form in the twentieth century. Cultural feminism as a theory is one of these waves. Donovan suggests in his book Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions that cultural feminism begins in the nineteenth century and takes its final form in the twentieth century. Accordingly, this study proposes that there is a cultural change in the characterization of ‘woman’ in the selected novels from three different periods: Pamela by Samuel Richardson, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles due to the emergence and the rise of cultural feminism in the periods when they were written.