The Life of Charlotte Bronte (English Library)

by Alan Shelston (Editor), ElizabethGaskell (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1975

  $4.48

  Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, and, having been invited to write the official life, determined both to tell the truth and to honour her friend. She contacted those who had known Charlotte and travelled extensively in England and Belgium to gather material. She wrote from a vivid accumulation of letters, interviews, and observation, establishing the details of Charlotte's life and recreating her background. Through an often difficult and demanding process, Gaskell created a vital sense of a life hidden from the world. This edition, based on the revised Third Edition of 1857, collated with the manuscript and the First Edition, and taking account of the Second Edition, offers fuller information about the process of writing and fuller elucidation of the text than any previous edition. For the first time, all the French passages are translated, and detailed annotation covers biographical and historical material, references, and allusions.

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $3.25

  Written by one great female novelist about another, Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte was the first and remains the most celebrated biography of the author of JANE EYRE. When it appeared in 1860 the biography caused a furore because it contained some allegedly libellous statements which had to be withdrawn. However, Elizabeth Gaskell was Charlotte's close friend during the last years of her life, and aimed in her biography to let Charlotte speak for herself through her letters. The writer Margaret Oliphant, then a young woman, remembered Life of Charlotte Bronte as a 'revolution as well as revelation ...That Cry shattered indeed altogether the delicacy which was supposed to be themost exquisite characteristic of womankind.'

• New

  paperback
  

  $14.07

  Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of her close friend Charlotte Bronte was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim, and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle An Autobiography. It recounts Charlotte Bronte's life from her isolated childhood, through her years as a writer who had 'foreseen the single life' for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than a year later. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - explored the nature of Charlotte's genius and almost single-handedly created the Bronte myth.