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Файл:Английский язык. Литературное наследие Великобритании XIX в.. Практикум для бакалавров укрупненных групп направлений подготовки «Науки об обществе», «
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The following year Anne died, and Charlotte wrote On the Death of Anne
Bronte. Charlotte was writing her epic novel Shirley (1849) around this time of
great loss and grief and it was noted that there was a change in her tone,
beginning from the first Chapter.
After publication of Shirley Charlotte was welcomed into London’s
literary society and she met many other authors of the day including Thackeray
and Elizabeth Gaskell. She also wanted to edither sister’s works. In 1853
Charlotte’s Villette was published with similar themes to Jane Eyre and Shirley;
the struggles of a strong independent woman and her need for love. After some
months of correspondence, on 29 June 1854 Charlotte married Arthur.
Her father came to agree that he was worthy of his daughter and approved. They
started their very short but happy marriage with a month-long honeymoon in
Ireland, then returned to Haworth. On 31 March 1855, after an extended illness,
Charlotte Bronte died while pregnant. She now rests with her mother, sisters
Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte and brother Patrick in the family vault of the
Church of Saint Michael and All Angels in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.
After her death, Arthur stayed with Rev. Patrick Bronte to care for him in
his declining years until he died in 1861. Not acting as priest anymore, Arthur
settled on a farm near Banagher in Northern Ireland. He married his cousin
Mary Anna Bell. They would have no children and Arthur died in 1906. In 1857
Charlotte’s friend Elizabeth Gaskell published her controversial biography and
homage The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, by
Clement K. Shorter, was published in 1896.
Famous quotations by Charlotte Bronte:
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or regis-
tering wrongs.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To
attack the first is not to assail the last.
Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity:
they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
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I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an
independent will.
I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.
Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match
the expectation.
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
Let your performance do the thinking.
Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts
themselves.
Look twice before you leap.
Popular works by Charlotte Bronte:
Novels:
Jane Eyre (1847)
Shirley (1849)
Villette (1853)
The Professor (1857)
Poetry:
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846)
Useful resources about Charlotte Bronte:
http://brontesisters.ru/sisters/charlotte
http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/brontes/charlotte/charlotte.asp
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/brontbio.html
http://www.biography.com/people/charlotte-bront-11919959
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Bronte’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Bronte’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Bronte’s works.
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Emily Jane Brontë
(Эмили Бронте)
Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only
novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily
was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest
Anneand her brother Branwell.
She was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, Emily
Brontë is best remembered for her 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. She was not
the only who loved literature, her sisters Charlotte and Anne enjoyed literary
process as well. Her father had published several works during his lifetime, too.
In 1821 Brontë’s mother died of cancer, her death came nearly nine
months after the birth of her sister, Anne. Her mother’s sister, Elizabeth
Branwell, came to live with the family to help care for the children. At the age
of 6, Emily was sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge with
Charlotte and her two oldest sisters, Elizabeth and Maria. Both Elizabeth and
Maria became seriously ill at school and returned home, where they died of
tuberculosis in 1825. Brontë’s father removed both Emily and Charlotte from
the school as well. At home in Haworth, Brontë enjoyed her quiet life. She read
extensively and began to make up stories with her siblings. The surviving
Brontë children, which included brother Branwell, had strong imaginations.
They created tales inspired by toy soldiers given to Branwell by their father.
In 1835 the shy Emily tried leaving home for school. She went with Charlotte to
Miss Wooler’s school in Roe Head where Charlotte worked as a teacher. But she
stayed there only a few months before returning back to Haworth.
Coming from a poor family, Brontë tried to find work. She became a
teacher at the Law Hill School in September 1837, when she was twenty.
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Thereafter she became the stay-at-home daughter, doing most of the cooking,
ironing, and cleaning and teaching Sunday school. She taught herself
Germanand also practised piano. Brontë and her sister Charlotte traveled to
Brussels in 1842 to study, but the death of their aunt Elizabeth forced them to
return home.
In 1844 Emily collected all the poems she had written, recopying them
neatly into two notebooks. One was labelled Gondal Poems; the other was unlabelled. In 1846, the sisters’ poems were published in one volume as Poems by
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The Brontë sisters had adopted pseudonyms for
publication, preserving their initials: Charlotte was ‟Currer Bell”, Emily was
‟Ellis Bell” and Anne was ‟Acton Bell”.
Emily Brontë remains a mysterious figure and the biographers know little
information about her, due to her solitary and reclusive nature. Her sister
Charlotte remains the primary source of information about her. She does not
seem to have made any friends outside her family. Being a shy and unsociable
person she spent much time with animals and in nature (she always walked with
a rabbit in her hands).
Some of Emily’s earliest known works involve a fictional world called
Gondal, which she created with her sister Anne. She wrote both prose and
poems about this imaginary place and its inhabitants. Emily also wrote other
poems as well. Her sister Charlotte discovered some of Emily’s poems and
sought to publish them along with her own work and some by Anne. The three
sisters used male pen names for their collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and
Acton Bell. Published in 1846, the book only sold a few copies and garnered
little attention.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847,
appearing as the first two volumes of a three-volume set. It was her defining
work. The authors were printed as being Ellis and Acton Bell; Emily’s real name
did not appear until 1850, when it was printed on the title page of an edited
commercial edition. The novel’s innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.
Wuthering Heights’s violence and passion led the Victorian public and many
early reviewers to think that it had been written by a man. The complex novel
explores two families across two generations and their stately homes, Wuthering
Heights and Thrush cross Grange. Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the
Earnshaws, is the driving force between the action in the book. He first
motivated by his love for his Catherine Earnshaw, then by his desire for revenge
against her for what he believed to be rejection.
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It was only after Brontë’s death that the book developed its reputation as a
literary masterwork. She died, aged 30 of tuberculosis on December 19, 1848,
nearly two months after her brother, Branwell. Her sister Anne also fell ill and
died of tuberculosis the following May.
Interest in Brontë’s works and life remains strong today. In her poetry,
Emily Brontë achieves a remarkable effect by the energy and sincerity, and
often by the music, with which she portrays her stoicism, independence and
compassion. The Haworth Parsonage where Brontë spent much of her life is
now a museum. The Brontë Society operates the museum and works to preserve
and honor the work of the Brontë sisters.
Famous quotations by Emily Bronte:
A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o clock,
runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or
town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
I see heaven’s glories shine and faith shines equal.
If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my
efforts be known by their results.
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The
holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?
Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Popular works by Emily Bronte:
Novels:
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Poetry (1846–1848):
A Death-Scene
A Day Dream
Anticipation
Faith and Despondency
Hope
How Clear She Shines
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Self-Interogation
Sympathy
Stars
The Philosopher
Useful resources about Emily Bronte:
http://www.biography.com/people/emily-bronte-9227381
http://brontesisters.ru/writings/novels/wuthering-heights
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/ebronte/bio.html
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Emily Bronte’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Emily Bronte’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Emily Bronte’s works.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
(Джордж Элиот, настоящее имя Мэри Энн Эванс)
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English
novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.
She is the author of seven novels, most of them set in provincial England and
known for their realism and psychological insight.
Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She was the second
child of Robert Evans and Christiana Evans, the daughter of a local mill-owner.
Mary Ann’s name was sometimes shortened to Marian. Her full siblings were
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Christiana, Isaac, and twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821.
She also had a half-brother, Robert, and half-sister, Fanny, from her father’s
previous marriage. Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of
the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary
Ann was born on the estate at South Farm. Evans went as a boarder to Mrs.
Wallington’s School at Nuneaton (1828–1832), where she came under the
influence of Maria Lewis, the principal governess, who inculcated a strong
evangelical piety in the young girl. At her last school (1835), conducted by the
daughters of the Baptist minister at Coventry, her religious ardour increased.
She dressed severely and engaged earnestly in good works. The school gave her
a reading knowledge of French and Italian. After her mother’s death she
returned home to keep house for her father. When she was 21, her brother Isaac
married and took over the family home, so Evans and her father moved to
Coventry. Evans was obviously intelligent and a voracious reader. Because she
was not considered physically beautiful, and thus not thought to have much
chance of marriage, and because of her intelligence, her father invested in her
education (what was not often afforded for women). Thanks to her father she
was allowed to have an access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided
her self-education and learning. Her classical education was reflected in her
works, so that some novels included deep knowledge of Greek literature, and her
themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy.
In Coventry she became acquainted with a prosperous ribbon
manufacturer, Charles Bray, and his brother-in-law Charles Hennell, the author
of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), a book that
precipitated Evans’s break with orthodoxy. Various books on the relation
between the Bible and science had instilled in her mind the doubts. In 1842 she
told her father that she could no longer go to church. The ensuing storm raged
for several months before they reached a compromise, leaving her free to think
what she pleased, but to appear respectably at church, and she lived with him
until his death in 1849.
In 1850 she moved to London with the desire to become a writer, and she
began referring to herself as Marian Evans. She stayed at the house of John
Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met earlier at Rosehill. Chapman
had recently purchased the journal The Westminster Review, and Evans became
its assistant editor in 1851. Although Chapman was officially the editor, it was
Evans who did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing many
essays and reviews beginning with the January 1852 issue and continuing until
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1854. During this period she formed a number of embarrassing, unreciprocated
emotional attachments, including one with Chapman (who was married but lived
with both his wife and his mistress), and another with Herbert Spencer.
At the Chapmans’ evening parties she met many notable literary figures in an
atmosphere of political and religious radicalism. Evans shared many ofSpencer’s
interests and saw so much of him that it was soon rumoured that they were
engaged. Though he did not become her husband, he introduced her to the two
men who did.
George Henry Lewes was the famous of Victorian journalists. In July
1854, after the publication of her translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of
Christianity, they went to Germany together. In all but the legal form it was
a marriage, and it continued happily until Lewes’s death in 1878. Before going
to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of
Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and
worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, which she completed in
1856, but which was not published in her lifetime.
In 1857, when she was 37, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos
Barton, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood’s
Magazine and, along with the other Scenes, it was well received (it was
published in book form early in 1858). Her first complete novel, published in
1859, was Adam Bede; it was an instant success, but it prompted intense interest
in who this new author might be. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure
her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under
their own names during Eliot’s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of
women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction
judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an
editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a
desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals
attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom
she lived for over 20 years. Eliot’s relationship with Lewes afforded her the
encouragement and stability and besides they were accepted into polite society.
Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877 when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria. The queen herself was an avid
reader of all George Eliot’s novels and was very much impressed with Adam
Bede.
After the success of Adam Bede, Eliot continued to write popular novels
for the next fifteen years. Within a year of completing Adam Bede, she finished
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The Mill on the Floss, dedicating the manuscript: To my beloved husband,
George Henry Lewes. Her last novel was Daniel Deronda, published in 1876,
after which she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey. By this time Lewes’s
health was failing, and he died two years later, on 30 November 1878.
Eliot spent the next two years editing Lewes’s final work, Life and Mind, for
publication, and she cooperated with John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission
agent, a man twenty years her junior.
On 16 May 1880 Eliot and John Walter Cross married. Again Evans
changed her name, this time to Mary Anne Cross. The legal marriage at least
pleased her brother Isaac, who had broken off relations with her when she had
begun to live with Lewes, but now sent congratulations. While the couple was
honeymooning in Venice, Cross, in a state of depression, jumped from the hotel
balcony into the Grand Canal. He survived, and they returned to England. They
moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. She
died on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61.
Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the
Christian faith and her life with Lewes. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery,
London, in the area reserved for religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the
love of her life, George Henry Lewes. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a
memorial stone was established for her in the Poets’ Corner.
Several buildings in her birthplace of Nuneaton are named after her or
titles of her novels. These include The George Eliot School and Middlemarch
Junior School. In 1948, Nuneaton Emergency Hospital was renamed George
Eliot Hospital in her honour. George Eliot Road, in Foleshill, Coventry was also
named in her honour.
A statue of Eliot is in Newdegate Street, Nuneaton, and Nuneaton
Museum & Art Gallery has a display of artifacts related to her.
Famous quotations by Eliot:
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each
other?
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not
sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough
beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to
tell you that you are very dear.
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A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart,
chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep
what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must
plant more roses.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points
of view.
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are
still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must
hunger for them.
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is
right and stick to it.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
Popular works by Eliot:
Novels:
Adam Bede (1859)
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Silas Marner (1861)
Romola (1863)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
Middlemarch (1871–1872)
Daniel Deronda (1876)
Poetry:
Agatha (1869)
Brother and Sister (1869)
Armgart (1871)
Stradivarius (1873)
The Legend of Jubal (1874)
I Grant You Ample Leave (1874)
Arion (1874)
A Minor Prophet (1874)
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