THE GOLDEN AGE OF WOMEN IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane

(Guest post by Maria Kruk, an author for Books.so)

The treasury of English literature is full of many remarkable authors and authoress. In particular, the names of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Bronte sisters still hold popularity in literature and, more notably, in cinematography. In the 19^th century female writers could undermine their male opponents in some way, which is probably associated with women feature of overacting and perceiving life events more closely. In very deed, the problem of a woman state in the society was widely discussed in the Victorian Age.

ASK JANE EYRE

"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you"

If you are obscure, plain, poor and little,  life  may not be smooth and easy for you. Ask Jane Eyre. You may have to bite wicked older cousins who want to torture you,  defend yourself from a jealous aunt who wishes you were dead, you may have to survive long solitary hours locked in a scary red room, then to strive to keep yourself sane and alive in a bleak, heartless place like a school for poor girls,  you must accept to go on living without anybody caring for you or loving you ... but, in the end, you'll meet your hero, your Mr Rochester and have your own reward. He is not tender and handsome, maybe, but impetuous, fascinating, authoritative, mysterious, restless. Anyhow, he doesn't trample on you, he doesn't make you feel a nobody, he treats you as his equal and trusts you. Last but not least, he desires you passionately. What if you discover on your wedding day that he has a mad wife in the attic and can't marry you? No panic, hold on, you can make it. You'll have to endure the awesome shock, run away and give up your dreams for a while, live among strangers you'll  learn to love for about a year, but be sure,  at last,  you'll have your reward, you'll have your happy ending.

ROMANCING MISS BRONTE BY JULIET GAEL - BOOK REVIEW

If you love Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë, this novel is unmissable. If you are interested in the lives of the Brontë family, so full of sorrow and talent, you'll love it.
I've just finished reading it and, by chance, I'm also working on the Brontës and their novels with my students at the moment. So Romancing Miss Brontë has come out a great source of anecdotes in order to bring  Charlotte, Emily and Anne to life for my pupils, with the aim to make today's teenagers see them as unique human beings as well as great writers. 
Practical advantages apart, reading this novel was a real treat and a great pleasure. I came to discover it after meeting  the author Juliet Gael in Rome not long ago (see my post) and I'm really happy I did it. 

Impossible not to be fascinated by the story of the three sisters who managed to get to fame thanks to their strength, talent and ... stubborness. Yes, stubborness. Because,  if we have Jane Eyre, Villette and Shirley,  Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,  we owe that especially to Charlotte's stubborness. She fought to make it and made it at last. This is the prevailing trait of  her personality revealed in Juliet Gael's portrait: a certain tenacity,  we might even recognize as stubborness.

The romance  suggested in the title is a constant element in the story. Charlotte spent most of her life trying to forget Monsier Heger, the married professor she fell in love with, unrequited, when she was studying in Brussels. She tried to recognize his stern stare and his strong personality in any man she met, and when she couldn't find them anywhere around her, she depicted those traits on paper, attributing them to her own iconic hero, Mr Rochester.

"The Brontës and the Shelleys - Crafting Stories from Lives" : A talk by Juliet Gael at Keats-Shelley House in Rome

Juliet Gael at Keats and Shelley House - Rome

It's been a very pleasant afternoon spent in one of the most spectacular landmarks in Rome, Piazza di Spagna, and more precisely at the Keats and Shelley House. Janice Graham, writing as Juliet Gael, is the author of the critically acclaimed historical novel Romancing Miss Brontë, and is currently working on a follow-up novel that deals with the fascinating lives of the Shelleys. She was the guest author at today's meeting and she gave a  talk  about crafting stories from the lives of iconic literary figures like Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley.

Part literary reading, part discussion, and part work-in-progress seminar, Juliet Gael addressed the creative problems involved in romanticising the lives of authors and gave us some tantalising sneak previews into the process of writing her book about the Shelleys.

Starting with E. M Forster's definition of events and story, Juliet conveyed the sense of great respect with which she approached her research and then her creation of a  story - line for Romancing Miss Brontë  .

AT THE CINEMA - JANE EYRE

If there is a heroine I deeply sympathized with in my teenage, she was Jane Eyre. She substituted Jo March, who had been my model heroine when I was a child. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is the book I have most frequently re-read in my life. Strangely enough, I haven't written much about the book or the several adaptations I saw on FLY HIGH. This is the first real occasion I find to discuss my admiration for Jane. Yes, for Jane more than for Rochester.

GOTHIC BRONTES

Though they lived in the Victorian Age and published their novels in those years, the three Bronte sisters share a great deal with the Romantic Age in their works: themes, literary devices and features, wild nature and tormented souls. For example, Charlotte’s Mr Rochester or Emily’s Heathcliff embody the typical Byronic hero: moody, restless, wild in manners, tormented but so attractive. The heroes and the heroines in their novels tend to be atypical, anti-conformist, unable to simply accept their duties. They are often led by feelings and passions. And all of that is not typically Victorian. The reading audience was shocked by Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847). (I still am sometimes re-reading it: she was so brave at writing and publishing such a novel at that time)

A literary taste the three writers share is that for Gothic elements. And this is what I want to point out in this post I prepared for The All About the Brontes Challenge.

Gothic novels were very popular at the end of the 18th century (the first one was published 1764 by Horace Walpole and was titled The Castle of Otranto) and their popularity went on through the Romantic Age. Lord Byron and his friends, among whom P.B. and Mary Shelley , spent their nights together reading and discussing gothic tales and they even proved themselves at writing one , but only Mary Shelley wrote something as worthy to be remembered as her Frankenstein (1818).

Gothic novels were based on frightening characters and events and had risen thanks to Edmund Burke ’s new conception of the sublime as “horrible beauty” whose main source was fear. What is Gothic then in our beloved novels by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte?

1. In Charlotte’s JANE EYRE (1847) we can recognize many  Gothic features

 Jane’s childhood terrors in Lowood school

 Thornfield mysterious nocturnal incidents

 A sense of supernatural

 The gloomy atmosphere

 Bertha’s madness

 Jane’s (apparently) unrequited love

2. The same can be said for Emily’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847): Gothic features are prevailing respect to Victorian themes

 the atmosphere of the setting ( that is sinister and sublime because of the stormy, windy weather on the moors )

 Catherine’s ghost

 the dreams

 the superstitions

 the graves

 the macabre details

 the themes of death and revenge

 Heathcliff as the villain who persecutes the naive heroine (Isabella Linton, Cathy Jr)

3. To recognize Gothic features in Anne’s THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL (1848) is less immediate.

I read this novel quite recently, not yet a year ago. Last summer in fact. I was impressed by young Anne courage at dealing with the theme of women’s equality. Her Helen is not a silent victim, what the society of the time would have expected from her since conventions dictated submissiveness. This is why this novel is often considered the first feminist novel.

But we have to focus on Gothic details . In The Tenant there are not so many.

Certainly its wonderfully Gothic title owes a debt to the Gothic tradition. Wildfell Hall is a desolate residence in an isolated place. And this is already a typical Gothic setting. Then, Helen is surrounded by mystery in the first part. Nodoby knows much about her and her past and her being self-possessedrather secluded and surrounded by secrecy makes her the victim of local slander.

In the second part, while we read Helen’s diary with Gilbert Markham, the mystery of her past is revealed and we are plunged in a different atmosphere which is still Gothic: Helen and her son become the victims of dissolute Arthur Huntington, respectively her husband and his father. Their lives were spoilt and exposed to many risks: Arthur lost control and became a brute, especially when drunk.

This character is said to be inspired to Branwell Bronte, the Bronte family’s spoilt son, but can well recall – in some moments and only in the central part , not in his sad end - the villain in the Gothic novels who abducted, threatened, raped naive girls.

So, we can conclude saying that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Gothic particularly in its sense of mystery and in its portrayals of an aristocratic life of decadence and emotional brutality

Related posts on FLY HIGH & LEARN ON LINE

A Wuthering Weekend

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

Shirley: Charlotte Bronte's historical novel

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall  by Anne Bronte

Gothic Austen

My students' lessons on

Jane Eyre 1

Jane Eyre 2

Wuthering Heights 1
Wuthering Heitghts 2

THE PROFESSOR BY CHARLOTTE BRONTE

“The Professor” was Charlotte Bronte’s first novel and it is the first of my tasks in the ALL ABOUT THE BRONTES challenge. It was only published after her death by her husband in 1857 . Charlotte herself wouldn’t agree with my saying that this was her first work. Read what she wrote in her preface to the novel:

"This little book was written before either "Jane Eyre" or "Shirley,"and yet no indulgence can be solicited for it on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt it certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn a good deal in a practice of some years. I had not indeed published anything before I commenced "The Professor," but in many a crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely. At the same time I had adopted a set of principles on the subject of incident, &c., such as would be generally approved in theory, but the result of which, when carried out into practice, often procures for an author more surprise than pleasure".  Go on reading it HERE

A partly autobiographical novel?

Charlotte Brontë's years at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels studying French under the guidance of monsieur Heger were two of the most important of her life.

On her return to Haworth, obsessed by the memory of her Belgian teacher, she wrote him a series of increasingly desperate letters, four of which are now preserved in the British Museum. It is nothing short of a miracle that the letters have survived at all. They were torn into small pieces, repaired with needle and thread and then left forgotten in a drawer until 1913.

What was the exact nature of Charlotte's feelings for Heger? What were Mme Heger's precise motives in repairing the letters?

What we are certain of is that those years in Brussels inspired Charlotte when writing her novels “The Professor” and “Villette”.

The plot

The Professor tells the story of the orphan William Crimsworth, who seeks his future in Brussels after attempting to make a living as a clerk for his older brother, a mill owner in the north of England. Crimsworth begins the novel as a dependant, the ward of an aristocratic family. He rejects this life and the expectation that he become a clergyman in order to enter voluntary servitude to his prosperous brother. Unable to endure his brother's tyrannical nature, Crimsworth departs for Brussels to pursue a career in education. Hired to teach English at a girls’ school, Crimsworth falls in love with Frances Henri, a pupil-teacher at the school. Crimsworth resists the manipulations of the deceitful Catholic headmistress, Zoraïde Reuter, who later marries the headmaster of a nearby boys’ school. After resigning his position at the school, Crimsworth finds a new post, enabling him to marry Frances. His bride refuses to give up her own career as a seamstress, and together the two earn a respectable income and return to England.

Strong prejudices against Catholics

I can hardly bear generalizations and prejudices and to find both in one of my favourite writer's books, even though in one of her firt attempts, has been rather shocking. There are several repeated attacks against Catholics and their moral integrity in the novel, they are fastidious and absolutely useless in the dynamics of the plot . What wicked  Catholics did Charlotte ever meet in Belgium to be so prejudiced against them in general?

Some examples of her dislike from the pages of “The Professor”

1. (Crimsworth describing the girls he taught)

“Most of them could lie with audacity when it appeared advantageous to do so. All understood the art of speaking fair when a point was to be gained, and could with consummate skill and at a moment's notice turn the cold shoulder the instant civility ceased to be profitable. Very little open quarrelling ever took place amongst them; but backbiting and talebearing were universal. Close friendships were forbidden by the rules of the school, and no one girl seemed to cultivate more regard for another than was just necessary to secure a companion when solitude would have been irksome. They were each and all supposed to have been reared in utter unconsciousness of vice. The precautions used to keep them ignorant, if not innocent, were innumerable. How was it, then, that scarcely one of those girls having attained the age of fourteen could look a man in the face with modesty and propriety? An air of bold, impudent flirtation, or a loose, silly leer, was sure to answer the most ordinary glance from a masculine eye.

I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman Catholic religion, and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome. I record what I have seen: these girls belonged to what are called the respectable ranks of society; they had all been carefully brought up, yet was the mass of them mentally depraved. So much for the general view: now for one or two selected specimens”. (chapter XII, p. 71)

2. ( Crimsworth thinking of Zoraide Reuter, the Catholic headmistress of the school he teaches in)

"Now, Zoraide Reuter," thought I, "has tact, CARACTERE, judgment,discretion; has she heart? What a good, simple little smile played about her lips when she gave me the branch of lilacs! I have thought her crafty, dissembling, interested sometimes, it is true; but may not much that looks like cunning and dissimulation in her conduct be only the efforts made by a bland temper to traverse quietly perplexing difficulties? And as to interest, she wishes to make her way in the world, no doubt, and who can blame her? Even if she be truly deficient in sound principle, is it not rather her misfortune than her fault? Shehas been brought up a Catholic: had she been born an Englishwoman, and reared a Protestant, might she not have added straight integrity to all her other excellences? Supposing she were to marry an English and Protestant husband, would she not, rational, sensible as she is, quickly acknowledge the superiority of right over expediency, honesty over policy? It would be worth a man's while to try the experiment; to-morrow I will renew my observations”. (chapter XII, p. 79)

3. (Frances Henri, talking with Crimsworth about her dreaming to leave Belgium for England)

"Besides, monsieur, I long to live once more among Protestants; they are more honest than Catholics; a Romish school is a building with porous walls, a hollow floor, a false ceiling; every room in this house, monsieur, has eyeholes and ear-holes, and what the house is, the inhabitants are, very treacherous; they all think it lawful to tell lies; they all call it politeness to profess friendship where they feel hatred."

"All?" said I; "you mean the pupils--the mere children--inexperienced,giddy things, who have not learnt to distinguish the difference between right and wrong?"

"On the contrary, monsieur--the children are the most sincere; they have not yet had time to become accomplished in duplicity; they will tell lies, but they do it inartificially, and you know they are lying; but the grown-up people are very false; they deceive strangers, they deceive each other--"(chapter XVII, pp. 106-107)

The protagonist, William Crimsworth

If he was really inspired to Monsieur Heger, what did Charlotte find in him? It is  natural to be fascinated by Charlotte’s Mr Rochester as it is definitely impossible to sympathize with this unnatural, cold, presumptuous, unappealing male charater here. This has been attributed to Charlotte Bronte’s immaturity as a writer at the time (1845-46). I just wonder, Jane Austen wrote Lady Susan at 17, why is it so easy to find her wicked leading character absolutely convincing in that work? I know I’m being terrible with such a great writer as Charlotte Bronte but this novel has really disappointed me, starting just from its protagonist.

Conclusions

Apart from its protagonist, I have other points to make to support my disappointment. I find all the characters result lacking humanity and real intensity. Moreover the plot suffers from the presence of boring and useless digressions and additions (see my quotations above, for instance); the narrating voice is always so detached from what happens, so little involving, and it is in the first person; the moralizing tone is often annoying. But it seems I’m not alone in my disliking it. Read for example this quotation from a critical essay:

“Eager for more from Charlotte Brontë's pen, readers were nevertheless unenthusiastic about The Professor, and it received numerous unfavorable reviews upon publication. Written from the point of view of a male narrator, the novel has been criticized as an immature effort and a failed attempt to write from the male perspective. Modern critics are primarily interested in the gender issues posed by the work and in analyzing the work's early reception, while others focus on the influence The Professor had on Brontë's later novels. However, Brontë's first attempt as a professional writer has consistently met with reservations from readers and critics alike”.

Now I’ve got “Villette” in my reading list for this challenge and I really hope to write a completely different review next time. Have you read “The Professor”? What do you think of it?

Related posts & sites

Read The Professor on line

Charlotte and Emily Bronte at school in Brussels

Emily Bronte, Devoirs de Bruxelles

SHIRLEY, CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S HISTORICAL NOVEL

You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek...you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.'

It took me quite a long time to finish this novel by Charlotte Bronte and it is not because I didn’t like it. I started it in a moment of frantic work and ended up reading only few pages a day , at night, when I was completely exhausted. So I went through the first 100 pages in … two months … but I’ve finished reading the other 442 in the last few days. While reading a book, I suffer from what I call “professional distortion”, I mean, I cannot simply enjoy the reading getting involved in the story. I tend to be always catching glimpses of other texts, finding links and connections, I need to underline the best passages and to add personal notes here and there, I search for more information about the author/ess as well as about the historical context in the setting. I know, I can be quite pedantic sometimes! Why do I have to be so complicated? Don’t worry, I do enjoy the stories I read, when it happens they are good. Enough with useless chatting, let’s start working on SHIRLEY .

What do you think of a story in which the two heroines seem to like the same man, the hero of the novel? And what if they are best friends and he proposes to the wealthier of the two girls to solve his financial problems but loves the other one? What do you expect from such premises? I found it extremely enjoyable.

SYNOPSIS

Shirley is Charlotte Bronte's only historical novel and her most topical one. Written at a time of social unrest, it is set during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when economic hardship led to riots in the woollen district of Yorkshire. A mill-owner, Robert Moore, is determined to introduce new machinery despite fierce opposition from his workers; he ignores their suffering, and puts his own life at risk. Robert sees marriage to the wealthy Shirley Keeldar as the solution to his difficulties, but he loves his cousin Caroline. She suffers misery and frustration, and Shirley has her own ideas about the man she will choose to marry. The friendship between the two women, and the contrast between their situations, is at the heart of this compelling novel, which is suffused with Bronte's deep yearning for an earlier time. (For a more detailed plot click HERE)

SHIRLEY was Charlotte second published novel after the success of JANE EYRE. When she began it, she was one of four siblings, she finished it as the only survivor sister and that influenced her writing much, of course.
SHIRLEY is not her best book, I mean, it is less compulsively readable than JANE EYRE. It is, anyway, the one in which she expresses more of her character: her conviction that women might be as well qualified as men to practise a profession (which sets her apart from most of her own contemporaries); her contempt for the market of marriage; her experience as a governess; her longing for a better past.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE & SOCIAL CRITICISM

Now the negative part of my review.

I’ve always considered Charlotte Bronte very brave since, when she wrote JANE EYRE, she completely disappointed and scandalized her "perbenistic" Victorian middle-class audience, creating a heroine who dared too much, who was greatlly independent and strong-willed, but, above all, who was totally different from the Victorian ideal woman, “the angel of the hearth”.
In SHIRLEY, however, she is not as brave as in her first novel , though her reader finds several pages in defence of the woman question and against the market of marriage. An example:
“Look at the numerous families of girls in the neighbourhood: the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they have something to do: their sisters have no earthly employment, but household work and sewing; no earthly pleasure, but an unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness.(…) They scheme, they plot, they dress to esnare husbands. (…) Could men live so themselves?”(p. 329)


Why am I saying that Charlotte Bronte was not very brave, then?

Her dealing with the woman question and the factory workers’ suffering is quite corageous in the social context of the Victorian Age but Charlotte, with SHIRLEY, drew back instead of daring more respect to what she had done in JANE EYRE: her good intentions are undermined by her acceptance of divisions of class, sex and race as natural and eternal. Her first and only historical novel deals with the Luddite riots (1811-12), the working-classes’ violent attacks against the introduction of machinery in factories. However, her effort to link the unfair suffering of workers to that of women is problematic from the start: she avoids representing the suffering of workers as fully as she depicts that of women. Then the novel’s middle-class women are as complicitous in the oppression of the workers as they are in “the regeneration of the interesting coloured population of the globe”. She fails to make the direct connection between the women’s right to be heard and that of the workers.

Moreover, in the scenes in which Robert Moore, the mill-owner male-protagonist of SHIRLEY faces the crowd of furious workers both the heroines and the narrator side with the hero.
So, I must admit, though reluctantly, that Charlotte Bronte was not as brave as her dear friend and first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, who was writing and published her MARY BARTON in the same years (Shirley 1849 – Mary Barton 1848) or would again bravely advocate for better living and working conditions for factory-workers in her NORTH AND SOUTH (1855).


I liked SHIRLEY but was a bit disappointed by one of my favourite writers. I am sure it mustn’t have been easy to write against public opinion at that time, especially as a woman, but her analysis of the claims of working men concludes in a mystification: there aren’t enough factory jobs, yet there’s no way to provide them so long as machines are more efficient labourers than humans, or to reconcile the mill-owner’s (just) demand for increased productivity and profit with the (just) demand of his workers for steady occupation and income.
Elizabeth Gaskel, instead, lived in Manchester, the big industrial city in the north of England, as the wife of reverend Gaskell, and well knew the reality she describes through her writing. She sympathised with workers in their struggle to improve their living conditions; what she never approved of in the working class was the choice of violence as a fighting strategy. She absolutely rejected violence and arrogance both in the employers and in their employees. She invited them to face each other in an open, honest, man-to-man relationship based on dialogue. She was attacked by her friends enterpreuners who published in their newspapers harsh criticism against her MARY BARTON since they felt offended by the portrayal Gaskell did of their selfishness and inhumanity. But she went on writing RUTH (inspired by a “fallen woman” who became a prostitute she really met) or NORTH AND SOUTH ( where Margaret, the protagonist, and the narrator mostly side with the workers) .