Search Results: Authors starting with B from Fay Tsapoga

Passionate and pain-filled, ferocious in their feeling, Jane Eyre and Villette celebrate the individual. In Shirley Charlotte Bronte chose to look wider to examine "the warped nature of things".
Written after the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, she found it a struggle to finish and in her portraits of Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone Charlotte Bronte poured out her feelings for her dead sisters. Nevertheless, it is a historical novel which depicts an uneasy era of Luddite riots, bad harvests and social unrest as well as Charlotte Bronte's belief that the denial of the world of feeling is responsible for much of society's suffering.
Tense, romantic, atmospheric, ringing with imaginative power, Charlotte Bronte's story of the two women and the men they loved grips until the last page.

Charlotte Bronte's first novel, The Professor, is narrated from the viewpoint of an ambitious and self-made man.
Rejecting his aristocratic inheritance William Crimsworth goes to Brussels to find his fortune. He takes a job teaching at a boarding school for young ladies, where he begins a flirtation with Zoraide Reuter, who, out of jealousy, attempts to frustrate his courtship of Frances Henri, an attractive young woman determined to make her way in the world.
In The Professor Charlotte Bronte holds up to scrutiny the Victorian ideals of self-help and individualism. The result is an unusual love story, and a novel profoundly critical of a society in which the relationships between men and women are reduced to power struggles.

In shaping Villette, as with Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte drew upon her own life.
Her heroine, Lucy Snowe, possesses neither beauty nor fortune, but her cool demeanour belies a passionate heart. Friendless and alone in the world, she takes up a position at a girls' school in Brussels presided over by the indomitable Madame Beck. There she falls under the spell of the vain, irascible and noble-hearted professor, M. Paul Emanuel.
Seldom has the ebb and flow of a love affair been portrayed so harrowingly and movingly. In its wit and flashes of poetry, its depth and originality of character, for many readers Villette is Charlotte Bronte's crowning achievement.

Charlotte Bronte's first published novel, Jane Eyre, was immediately recognized as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847.
Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime of Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre none the less emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr. Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.
In his introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition Michael Mason discusses the literary critical history of Jane Eyre and provides fresh insights into Charlotte Bronte's great novel.

Emily Bronte's only novel appeared to mixed reviews in 1847, a year before her death at the age of thirty. In the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, and in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors of its setting, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with a disregard for convention, an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology that make it one of the greatest novels of passion ever written.
"Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor...with time and labour tha crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal" - Charlotte Bronte
Pauline Nestor provides a new Introduction for this Penguin Classics edition of Emily Bronte's masterpiece.