Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life - Softcover

Lyndall Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393314480 ISBN 13: 9780393314489

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Synopsis

“[The] contradictions in [Bronte¨’s] life are not only fully chronicled by Lyndall Gordon’s splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work. . . . [Gordon] chooses to use her imaginative sympathies―honed to precision with earlier biographies of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot―to delineate her subject’s rich interior life.” ―Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

This highly acclaimed biography looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones. Instead we see a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Lyndall Gordon looks at the shared gifts and class ambitions of the Bronte¨ family, and also at significant people―the active feminist Mary Taylor, the demanding mentor Constantin Heger, the rising publisher George Smith―whom Charlotte strove to possess in life and fiction. Drawing on unpublished letters, the “Roe Head Journal,” early stories, the manuscript of Villette, and her last, unfinished novel, Lyndall Gordon explores the gaps in Charlotte Bronte¨’s life. How did she arrive at her understanding of passion from a woman’s point of view? Could she resolve the testing conflict between a writer’s life and a seemingly incongruous marriage to the devoted curate Arthur Bell Nicholls? Looking into the shadow between the facts, Gordon takes biography into that unseen space where this woman of genius was able to live.

About this title

About the Author:

Lyndall Gordon is the prize-winning author of T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life and Lives Like Loaded Guns. She is a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN. She lives in Oxford.

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 & Company
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0393314480
• ISBN 13: 9780393314489
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 456