Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life - Hardcover

Gordon, Lyndall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393037223 ISBN 13: 9780393037227

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1995

Synopsis

An unconventional biography discovers the real Charlotte Bronte+a5 behind the loneliness, loss, and unrequited love--a strong woman with a fierce belief in herself, creative energy, and powerful ambition, who shaped her life and transformed it into art.

About this title

About the Author:

Lyndall Gordon teaches at St. Hilda's College, Oxford University.

From Booklist:

The author of Jane Eyre and Villette lived an extraordinary life, not so much in terms of events, but because of her profound resourcefulness and creative expressiveness. Gordon, author of a biography of Virginia Woolf and Shared Lives (1992), achieves some remarkable eloquence herself as she dismantles once and for all the image of Charlotte Bront{‰}e as a figure of pathos and presents, instead, a courageous survivor, a determined writer, and a woman of volcanic emotion. Small, tough, and unfashionable, Bront{‰}e lived on after her mother and her five siblings, including fellow writers Emily and Anne, succumbed to illness and death. As the physical world betrayed her, Bront{‰}e turned to the life of the mind and the revitalizing power of words. Gordon, as skilled at literary analysis as at chronicling a life, approaches Bront{‰}e's tragic and enduringly relevant story from several angles, carefully identifying all the autobiographical elements of her novels and contrasting her commitment to writing and her independent spirit to her era's strict and pitiless code of behavior for women. Gordon also examines the gestalt of Bront{‰}e's unusual family, her painful relationships with men, and her decision, at the peak of her success, to choose life over art and marry, a choice followed all too soon by her premature death. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0393037223
• ISBN 13: 9780393037227
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416