Definition
Charlotte Brontë was a novelist and poet who grapples with religion, class, and gender in her writing. She was one of the first novelists in the period to represent the fraught inner lives of female characters. Though she did not advocate for women’s rights politically, her novels critique the confined role of women by presenting intelligent, independent, and passionate female characters who desire real vocations and a voice in their lives and their society.
Introduction
Charlotte Brontë published one book of poetry with her sisters and four novels of her own and wrote hundreds of pages of juvenilia in collaboration with her siblings. By 1816, when Brontë was born, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and Evangelicalism had converged to create the “angel in the house” figure of woman, an ideal being created for self-abnegation and service of others that would come to be regarded as the moral guard of England’s heart and mind. Brontë’s writing exposes the narrowness of...
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References
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Pond, K. (2019). Brontë, Charlotte. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_31-1
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