The Victorian era is known
for the galaxy of female novelists. CHARLOTTE BRONTE, EMILY BRONTE, Mrs.
Gaskell and GEORGE ELIOT are in prime focus. They also include Mrs.
Trollope, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Maroh, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. Henry, charlotte younger, Miss
Oliphant, and still more. However, the four most important women novelists, who
yet are quite important, are charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and
George Eliot. Of the four, the two first named were sister, and their methods
and achievement as novelists met at many places. But each of the remaining two
priced her own line and made herself known in the field of English novel in her
own way.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816 – 55) –
The three Bronte sister –
Anne, charlotte, and Emily – collectively known often as the “Stormy
sisterhood”, who took the England of their time by storm, were in actual life
shy and isolated girls with rather uneventful lives. All of them died young and
died of Tuberculosis.
Charlotte wrote four novels
- ‘The professor’, ‘Vilette’,
‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Shirley’.
The first two novels were based on her personal experiences at a Brussels
boarding house where she most probably fell in love with the Belgian scholar
Hager who perfectly answered her conception of a dashing hero of the Byronic
type. The heroine of her third novel is a governess, just like her sister Anne.
Her tempestuous love affair with Rochester – a combination of wonderful
nobility and meanness is the staple of this novel.
Charlotte Bronte in her
novel revolted against the traditions of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray.
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair she
praised in glowing terms, but she herself never attempted anything of the kind.
Her novels are novel of manners but of passions and the naked soul. Her
characters – mostly the effusion of her own soul – are elemental figures aching
in the back drop of elemental nature.
