Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century

This collection recently published contains a couple of Brontë chapters:

Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century
Volume I: Life Writing
Edited By Valerie Sanders

Imprint: Routledge

eBook ISBN: 9781003199861

November 2021

This collection of primary sources examines literary and cultural criticism over the long nineteenth century. Volume I of 4, explores the subjects of life-writing, including biography, autobiography, diaries, and letters. This volume will be of great interest to students of literary history.

Including:

Chapter 34.

Henry Chorley, ‘The life of Charlotte Brontë’

The Athenaeum (4 April 1857), pp. 427, 428–429

By Joanne Shattock, Joanne Wilkes, Katherine Newey, Valerie Sanders

Apart from the education of wild scenery and strange neighbours, the Brontë children were disciplined by some singularities, such as possibly will not find place in this land of ours, to constrain and damage the girls of a coming generation. Their father was a handsome, clever Irish clergyman—their mother was a lady belonging to the far west, the county of Cornwall, which, with its picturesque scenery and its quaint family histories, teems, even to this day, with varieties of English character. It was no wonder that the girls all became delicate, unhealthy and spiritless,—that the Author of ‘Jane Eyre’ never attained her full growth, and that her elder sisters proved not vigorous enough to resist the dirt, neglect and misery of the foundation-school at Cowan’s Bridge, to which they were sent, but died there,—this being one of the first experiences of life, it may be, which made its print on the mind of Charlotte Brontë.

And in Volume IV:

Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century

Volume IV: Women Critics

Edited By Joanne Wilkes

Imprint Routledge

eBook ISBN9781003199922

This collection of primary sources examines literary and cultural criticism over the long nineteenth century. The final volume 4 of 4 explores the subject of drama criticism written by women. This volume will be of great interest to students of literary history.

Chapter 29.

Introduction to the Haworth Edition of Jane Eyre

(Smith Elder, 1899), pp. ix–xiv, xix–xxxviii

by Joanne Shattock, Joanne Wilkes, Katherine Newey, Valerie Sanders

Jane Eyre was first published in October 1847. Half a century—since this tale of the North by an unknown writer stole upon London, and, in the very midst of the serial publication of ‘Vanity Fair,’ took the town by storm, obtaining for its author in the course of a few weeks a success which, as the creator of Becky Sharp afterwards said to her, a little sadly and sharply, ‘it took me the work of ten years to achieve.’