Charlotte bronte biography timeline
Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? In her late 30s, she finally married Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, a union made bittersweet by her tragic death shortly thereafter.
Gaskell portrays her marriage as a fulfillment of long-awaited love and companionship. However, the joy was short-lived as Charlotte died shortly after giving birth. She skillfully juxtaposes personal anecdotes with biographical facts. Her love and admiration for Charlotte is reflected in her writing.
She delicately omits certain scandals involving Branwell, highlighting her commitment to preserve their dignity.
Charlotte bronte siblings: The Life of Charlotte Brontë is the posthumous biography of Charlotte Brontë by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. The first edition was published in by Smith, Elder & Co. A major source was the hundreds of letters sent by Brontë to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey.
Gaskell asserts that Charlotte was more than a tragic figure; she possessed a vibrant spirit and intellect. The biography embodies the spirit of the Victorian era, showcasing the struggles of women writers. From here you can jump to the Spoilers section right away. Below you can search for another book summary: Search Search.
Charlotte bronte biography gaskell north and east
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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. While he was finding his bearings, his wife gave birth to eight children, of whom only the first-born, John, and the last, Elizabeth, survived. Elizabeth Holland Stevenson died 13 months after her daughter's birth.
Charlotte bronte biography gaskell north
After the death of her mother, Elizabeth was sent, in what seemed at the time the best arrangement for the year-old child, to live with her maternal aunt, Hannah Holland Lumb , whom she later described as her "more than mother," in the small country town of Knutsford in Cheshire. Although her father married again when she was four, Elizabeth was not invited to return to his home in London, and she described her infrequent visits with her father, stepmother, and their two children as "very, very unhappy.
From the 12 years she spent in Knutsford, Gaskell gained a deep and lasting love of nature that finds expression even in those works of hers dealing almost entirely with urban themes and settings. While it does not seem that her father, occupied by his second family, visited her in Knutsford, her brother John, 12 years her senior, did. Following the naval tradition of his father's family, John hoped for a career in the Royal Navy but, gaining no entree there, joined the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet.
Through letters and his visits, the brother and sister developed strong bonds of affection, and John was the first to encourage Elizabeth's gift for writing. He asked her to keep a journal so that she would have plenty to report to him in her letters. This warm and intimate relationship ended tragically when he was lost on a voyage to India around Elizabeth felt this loss deeply; she later transformed it imaginatively in several of her works that involve the return of a character who has been lost and presumed dead.
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In , Gaskell was sent to the Miss Byerleys' school, located at Barford and later at Stratford-upon-Avon, a boarding school where she received a good education for a woman of her day, in keeping with the liberal Unitarian tradition that offered women educational opportunities comparable in quality to those given men. At a time when most boarding schools prepared middle-class young women for marriage by emphasizing domestic and ornamental arts, Miss Byerleys' Avonbank School encouraged the development of Elizabeth's intellectual abilities and imagination with its emphasis on modern subjects: literature, history, and modern languages.
She left school in , shortly before her 17th birthday, and went with her Holland relatives for a six-week holiday in Wales, where the romantic wildness and grandeur of the Welsh mountains and sea provided a complementary dimension to the love of nature she had developed in the quiet and gently rolling rural landscapes of Knutsford and Stratford.
Gaskell went to London at the end of or early to comfort her father when she learned of her brother's loss and was with him when he suffered a stroke and died in March Now motherless, fatherless, brotherless, she felt her lack of immediate family keenly, even though she knew she would always have a home at Knutsford.
To her father's second family, she felt no strong connections; she did not see her stepmother and stepsister again for 25 years. Elizabeth spent the winter of —30 in Newcastle with Anne Turner and her father Reverend William Turner , a widowed Unitarian minister and schoolmaster related by his first marriage to Elizabeth's mother.
In , with Anne, Elizabeth visited Edinburgh and Manchester, where Anne's sister lived with her husband, the Unitarian minister of the Cross Street chapel, to whom William Gaskell was assistant minister. The dedicated and scholarly Mr. Gaskell, the city of Manchester, and the Unitarian tradition would shape the next 33 years of maturity for the motherless child of Knutsford and the bereaved young woman of London by giving her the three things that meant most to her: a family of her own, a sense of useful work in service to others, and a vocation as a writer.
Charlotte bronte biography gaskell north and south
When she married William Gaskell in , Elizabeth Stevenson committed herself to the religious and philanthropic principles of the Unitarian community of family and friends she had known all her life. But these principles were to find their practice in Manchester of the s, a prototypical north of England city created by the Industrial Revolution.
In , Manchester was a city with an economy based on cotton mills and calico-printers' works. Attracted by the work and wages offered by the rapidly growing cotton industry, the population had grown in 40 years from approximately 40, to over a quarter of a million.
The cotton workers were housed in the center of the city in cheap, quickly constructed, back-to-back terrace houses and courts, which, because of lack of planning, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions, rapidly degenerated into the worst urban slums in England. Although like most of the middle-class inhabitants of Manchester, the Gaskells lived on the edge of the city in a relatively rural setting, the social work they engaged in through the Cross Street Chapel brought both—unlike others of their class who never crossed the smoke barrier that separated the factories, warehouses, and working-class districts from their homes—into close contact with the conditions of physical, spiritual, and moral decay that were by-products of the "progress" of the Industrial Revolution.
In her fourth novel, North and South , Elizabeth Gaskell describes from the perspective of her heroine Margaret Hale what may very well have been her own first impression of Manchester:. They saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which [the city] lay. It was all the darker from the contrast with the pale grey-blue of the wintry sky….
Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke…. Quickly they were hurled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black "unparliamentary" smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud.
Into this paradoxical city of new wealth and poverty, the promise of progress and the evidence of deterioration, Elizabeth brought the sympathy that had been nourished by her Knutsford years and the conscience and egalitarianism instilled by the Unitarian values with which she grew up. In the early years of her marriage, she joined her husband in his work with Sunday schools and evening classes.
In a letter written in she reports completing "compositions" on Wordsworth, Byron, Crabbe, Dryden, and Pope for a series of lectures William delivered at the evening school of the Mechanics' Institute for Working-Class Men.