Have you ever wanted to know more about your favorite classic authors? Each month, we share various facts about the lives and works of our Author of the Month.
During January, we honored Anne Brontë as our Author of the Month to tie in with the bicentenary of Brontë’s birth. Anne was born on January 17th 1820 in Yorkshire and some of the most interesting things we learned about her this month were…
Anne is the youngest sibling and was known to be the most delicate of all the Brontë children, and after the death of her eldest sisters she was educated at home rather than at Cowan Bridge with Emily and Charlotte.
In 1839, Anne Brontë began work as a governess for the Ingham family. This experience influenced Anne to write her first novel, ‘Agnes Grey,’ which described the experience of being a governess as being a miserable one–spending all day with spoiled children she was forbidden to punish.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered a manuscript of Emily’s poems and made it her mission to publish a collection of the sisters’ poetry. By May 1846, at the sisters’ expense, a collection of the poems of 'Curer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’ was published.
After Branwell Brontë’s death on 24 September 1848 and Emily’s on 19 December, symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis became evident in Anne’s declining health. Charlotte took her to the sea to recover, and it was there Anne Brontë died on 28 May 1849 at their lodging at 2 St Nicholas Cliff, Scarborough—with almost her last breath saying she was happy, and thanking God that 'death was come, and come so gently.’
For the month of February, we are exploring the life and work of Victor Hugo. Be sure to follow the #ClassicsInContext hashtag on TwitterandFacebook to learn more!
i’m thinking about charlotte brontë spending her last years editing and publishing her sisters’ writings and about christopher tolkien dedicating his life to the protection and meticulous reconstruction his father’s life’s work and about johanna van gogh publishing the letters between vincent and theo that would propel vincent van gogh into fame because she knew how much her husband had loved his brother, and about how so often art isn’t just a reflection of the artist’s mind and skills but a testament to the fact that they were loved
I shall use this post to tell you all that Berserk is being continued by the original creators best friend
What a wonderful way to honor your loved one’s legacy.
Happy 200th Birthday Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre was my teenage favourite and my original much loved, bath crinkled and heavily annotated Penguin Classics paperback is a real bookcase treasure.
“The men in the Brontë sister’s books are weird. They’re not the same as what anyone else was writing, they’re not gothical men, even. Wuthering Heights is the peak Gothic novel, but Heathcliff is not a gothic novel hero or villain. Rochester is messy and in-between in a way that was really unusual for this time. And while none of them are great guys from our modern perspective (please don’t model your relationship on Heathcliff and Catherine), I think that the impulse to say, ‘Look at all these terrible men that the Brontë girls wrote, it’s proof that their father was a monster,’ is that same thing that we often to do female writers. [There’s this idea] that male writers create works of art and female writers narrate their experiences and we try to make everything that a woman writes autobiographical in ways that we never do to men.”
—What’s Her Namepodcast,Episode 60 “THE ABSENCE: Maria Branwell Brontë”
Big news for TV this week! BBC Wales will be producing a new movie-length drama called “To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters,” which I’ll be eagerly awaiting. This particular summary puts a lot of weight on Branwell and Patrick, so I’m hoping it’s not a “but what about the MEN in their lives?????” type drama or, worse yet, a “Branwell as solitary male genius with alcohol addiction” cliche.
Queen Victoria’s court is the perfect setting for an epic drama – a seething hotbed of scandal, corruption and romantic intrigue, involving everyone from the humblest dresser to the Mistress of the Robes, the lowliest bootboy to the Lord Chamberlain.
Things I do want to see out of this drama:
How much Queen Victoria loved sex
How she really didn’t care for children (“An ugly baby is a very nasty object — and the prettiest is frightful when undressed — till about four months; in short, as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action.”)
Open address of British colonialism
Things I don’t wanna see:
Get yr scandal and romantic intrigue outta here tbh Victoria put the first interior plumbing in the palace I’d rather watch an hour long episode in which everyone is confounded by a toilet and that’s all that happens
