Charlotte Bronte and her novel “Jane Eyre”. Group: Written by: Supervisor: Tashkent 2022

1.2. Charlotte Bronte’s and her biography.
English author Charlotte Bront, also known by her married name Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls and pen name Currer Bell, was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on April 21, 1816, and died in Haworth, Yorkshire, on March 31, 1855. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre (1847), a powerful portrayal of a woman at odds with her natural desires and social position. The book gave Victorian fiction a fresh sense of realism. Later, she authored Villette (1849) and Shirley (1849). (1853). Anglican priest Patrick Bront (1777–1861) was her father. He was born in Ireland and had changed his name from the more typical Brunty. After serving in many parishes, he went to Haworth in the Yorkshire moors in 1820 with his wife, Maria Branwell Bronte, and their six young children after being appointed to the rectorship there. The father was left to take care of the remaining four girls—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—as well as a boy named Branwell after the death of Mrs. Bront and the two eldest kids (Maria and Elizabeth) not long after. Elizabeth Branwell, an aunt who moved in with the family in Haworth after leaving her native Cornwall, helped with the children's upbringing. Before their deaths, their older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, attended the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, close to Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire, in 1824. Low fees, bland food, and strict rules were all present. Long years later, Charlotte decried the school in Jane Eyre under the flimsy guise of Lowood Institution, and its headmaster, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, has been recognized as the literary equivalent of Mister Brocklehurst. After Charlotte and Emily left in June 1825, the Bront children learned and played at home for more than five years while creating imaginative games to play indoors or on the lonesome moors. They also wrote and told romantic stories to one another. Charlotte spent a year at Miss Wooler's school in Roe Head, close to Huddersfield, where she established some lifelong friends. Her correspondence with one of these friends, Ellen Nussey, lasted until her death and is largely responsible for the present understanding of Charlotte's life. She left Roe Head in 1832 to teach her sisters at home, although she later returned as a teacher in 1835. The only way she could channel her unfulfilled energies was to work to raise her family's position. Additionally, Branwell was about to launch his artistic career, necessitating a supplement to the family's financial resources. Charlotte found the work, with its inescapable limitations, to be unappealing. She developed health problems and melancholy and called off her engagement in the summer of 1838. Charlotte turned down proposals from two young clergymen in 1839—the Reverend Henry Nussey, the brother of her acquaintance, and another one a few months later. In order to pay off Branwell's debts and fulfill her desire to use her talents as effectively as possible, Charlotte was persuaded to work as the White family's governess for a few months at Upperwood House in Rawdon. Branwell had garnered great expectations due to his writing and artistic abilities, outstanding classical learning, and social graces; nonetheless, he was inherently unstable, weak-willed, and intemperate. He changed jobs frequently and turned to booze and opium for solace. In the meantime, his sisters had discussed opening a school together. Their aunt agreed to provide the funding, and in February 1842, students Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels to strengthen their knowledge of French and learn a bit of German. Both individuals' talent caught Constantin Héger's attention, a superb teacher and a person of extraordinary intuition. When her aunt passed away, Charlotte took a quick journey home before returning to Brussels as a student-teacher. She lived there throughout 1843, but she felt lonely and down. She had moved away from Brussels, and Madame Héger seemed to have grown resentful of her. There has been much discussion over Charlotte's relationship with Héger and her level of self-awareness. He possessed the most intriguing mind she had yet encountered, and he had seen and called forth her hidden skills. Her sense of humor and her love were both captured by his strong and unique personality. He made an effort to suppress her feelings as she provided him a pure but passionate devotion. It's possible to term the letters she sent him after coming home "love letters." But when he said that they might be misunderstood, she stopped writing and began working silently on controlling her emotions. Regardless of how they are seen, Charlotte's experiences in Brussels were essential to her growth. She obtained a rigorous literary education, discovered her own natural resources, and accumulated information that she used to create all of her novels. Due to her father's declining eyesight, Charlotte attempted to establish the school she had long imagined in the parsonage itself in 1844. Although prospectuses were distributed, no students were drawn to far-off Haworth. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), also known as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were published as a joint volume after Charlotte discovered some of Emily's poems in the autumn of 1845. The pseudonyms were used to maintain secrecy and avoid the preferential treatment they believed reviewers gave to women. Only two copies were sold, and it garnered minimal reviews. However, a path had now been available to them, and they were now working to find a home for the three novels they had written. While in Manchester visiting her father, who had traveled there for an eye operation, Charlotte tried to place The Professor: A Tale but had almost finished Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. She immediately finished and submitted it after Smith, Elder and Company announced that they would be open to reading a three-volume book with more action and excitement in it after rejecting The Professor. After being approved, Jane Eyre was released on October 16, 1847, and it immediately became more successful than the books her sisters had also published that year. The next months were terrible ones. Emily passed away in December 1848, Branwell in September 1848, and Anne in May 1849. In the vacant parsonage, Charlotte finished Shirley: A Tale, which was published in October. Charlotte visited London three times as a guest of her publisher over the ensuing years, where she met author William Makepeace Thackeray and posed for a painting by George Richmond. She visited her future biographer Elizabeth Gaskell in Manchester and hosted her in Haworth when staying with the writer Harriet Martineau in 1851. Published in January 1853 was Villette. She turned down a third marriage proposal in 1851, this one from James Taylor, a partner at Smith, Elder, and Company. The fourth guy she dated was an Irishman named Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817–1906), the curate of her father. After several months of gaining her father's approval, they were wed on June 29, 1854, in the Haworth church. After their honeymoon in Ireland, they came back to Haworth, where her husband had promised to keep serving as her father's curate. Although he did not share his wife's academic interests, she was content to accept her responsibilities as his wife and to be appreciated for who she was. She started writing Emma, which still has few pages left. However, she struggled mightily during her pregnancy and passed away in 1855. The Correspondence of Charlotte Bronte, a three-volume version of her letters edited by Margaret Smith, appeared between 1995 and 2004. Patrick Bront trained his four surviving children at home and gave them education in music and painting from qualified tutors after the horrific event at Cowan Bridge. The kids were eager readers and attentive students who also continued their imaginative play with Charlotte's guidance. They were free to choose whatever they wanted from their father's collection of books, which included the Bible and all the traditional family favorites like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678–1684), Hannah More's Moral Sketches (1784), John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–1730), and The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Blackwood's Magazine, which greatly inspired Charlotte and Branwell's early writing, as well as Fraser's Magazine For Town and Country, which first appeared in 1832, were both lively and significant conservative publications with a strong emphasis on literature that the family routinely received. The Bronts were members of the Keighley Mechanics' Institute library, as well as one or more of the neighborhood circulating libraries that featured popular contemporary fiction and poetry, and it appears that they also had access to the library at Ponden House, a nearby private estate. On June 5, 1826, Mr. Bront returned from a trip to Leeds with a gift for Branwell—a box of toy soldiers—to which all four children instantly laid claim. This was a turning point in the Bronts' literary apprenticeship. Each youngster chose a soldier to be his or her own, gave the soldier their favorite childhood hero (Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington), and then started creating plays and stories centered on and using the voices of these soldiers. The earliest of these writings were composed in tiny manuscripts with virtually microscopic writing so that their size would match that of their purported writers, the toy soldiers. Children's stories by Charlotte Bronte center on the imagined exploits of Charles and Arthur Wellesley, sons of the Duke of Wellington, and the upper class of "Glass Town," which subsequently became the country of "Angria." Charles, his younger brother, is a less powerful, frequently humorous character who spies and reports on the scandalous doings of his Angrian compatriots—particularly his brother and his numerous paramours. Arthur, who was soon promoted to the title "Duke of Zamorna," is a recognizably Byronic hero who engages in romantic intrigues as well as political treachery. Both Wellesleys are writers, and it's significant that Charles becomes the family poet while Bronte's alluring but morally repugnant Duke of Zamorna establishes himself as the family storyteller and her favorite narrator. These early stories not only show the themes that preoccupied Bronte as a young writer and that return in her adult work—themes of romantic passion and sexual politics, desire, betrayal, loyalty, and retribution—but also show her early awareness of a problem that was crucial to early Victorian literary culture: the worry that poetry writing was a self-indulgent and possibly immoral activity. Bront's "self-concentered" poet-duke is one of the ways she illustrates her own early uncertainty about being a poet. He is romantically attractive but destructively arrogant. This ambivalence, which masculine Victorian poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold also felt, was undoubtedly later exacerbated by social rules against feminine subjectivity. The Bronte sisters' young writings have been rightly compared to fantasies, but they weren't just wishful thinking. Early works like "A Romantic Tale," published on April 15, 1829, show the young authors' familiarity with Blackwood's Magazine articles on British colonization of Africa from 1826 as well as more traditional sources like the Bible (especially the Book of Revelations), J. Goldsmith's Grammar of General Geography (1825), the writings of Bunyan, the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and Tales of the Genii (1820) by Sir Chad (pseudonym of James Ridley). Characters in children's literature discuss current events like the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, engage in political snooping about notable people like the Duke of Wellington, and engage in military operations inspired by their understanding of historical battles like the Peninsular War, 1808–1814. The fictitious setting for the stories—which is supposedly on the coast of West Africa—owes a lot to the well-known John Martin paintings of oriental cityscapes, and the Angrians are based on modern engravings that Charlotte painstakingly copied from popular annuals like The Literary Souvenir and books like Finden's Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833–1844). By 1829 Branwell was "editing" Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine (ironically, the name was changed to Blackwood's Young Men's Magazine when Charlotte took over as editor seven months later), and the two were working together to create tiny, hand-sewn volumes that imitated Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the inspiration for them, in incredibly minute detail. Charlotte and Branwell's magazines are collections of writings in a variety of genres—plays, stories, poems, imagined dialogues, letters, drawings, anecdotes, essays—and, like its prototype, they contain advertising, editorial notes, and details regarding publication and marketing. Charlotte and Branwell recreated Blackwood's Magazine in its physical form, participating in literary rumor and debates similar to those they learned about through reading. These activities filled the pages of their narratives with literary reviews and acrimonious personal exchanges between Glass Town intellectuals. Charlotte Bront first tried poetry during this formative stage of lighthearted yet profound engagement in make-believe literary life. The 14-year-old made a determined effort to distinguish herself as a poet by producing 65 poems and a satirical play about poetry writing in 1829-1830. Though the majority of these early poems are set in the Glass Town universe and are spoken or sung by fictional characters, others are only tangentially related to the story. Many are intriguing because they show Bront's exposure to contemporary literary discussions like those about "neglected brilliance," the relative importance of tradition and imitation vs originality and inspiration, and how poetry is seen by readers in a shifting literary landscape. Bront's experiments with numerous poetic genres during this time show how she created her own apprenticeship by copying earlier poets. For instance, she draws inspiration from the 18th-century topographical poem created by "nature poets" like James Thomson and William Wordsworth for many of her descriptions of natural surroundings. Additionally, Bront's numerous poetry that were adapted into songs can be considered as influenced by the well-known Thomas Moore. Naturally, a poem this young demonstrates Bronte's immaturity as a poet as well as her excitement for her line of work. In other works, Bront has the capacity to laugh off her own literary pretenses. Such a charming dogge[re]l / as this was never written / not even by the mighty & high Sir Walter Scott, she observes at the end of one lushly described poem. Although visionary, lyre-playing bards and other Romantic poet-figures can be found in the early poems, Bront frequently parodies the romantic idea of the poet as a self-inspired original genius in her stories and plays. To disprove her own and her siblings' amorous pretensions, she employs parodic figures like Henry Rhymer in "The Poetaster," a story that was published between July 6 and 12, 1830. The shifting literary landscape of England in the 1830s, when printing technology enabled the entry of numerous new authors into the literary market, is also comically portrayed in "The Poetaster." A publisher in Glass Town laments that the "great profession [of composition] is dishonoured" and predicts that "every child that goes through the streets, with its manuscripts in its hand, going to the printers for publishing" will soon happen. Bront displays a good-natured understanding of the prospects and challenges associated with pursuing a literary profession in her day by making fun of her own and her brothers' immature literary aspirations. Bront left Haworth for the second time in January 1831, moving 20 miles to enroll at Roe Head School in Mirfield, close to Dewsbury. This burst of literary output was cut short. Roe Head was a small school that was owned and run by Margaret Wooler, who her father described as a "clever, decent, and motherly woman." It typically only accepted about seven boarding students at a time, all girls around the same age, allowing it to pay close attention to each student's needs and abilities. Bront was initially homesick and isolated from the other students due to her differences from them—her outdated dress, slightly eccentric behavior caused by her poor eyesight and timidity, her ignorance of grammar and geography as well as her precocious knowledge of literature and the visual arts—but over time, she gained the respect and affection of her peers and began to feel at home in her new school environment. Bronte had two distinct but enduring friendships at Roe Head. One such acquaintance was Ellen Nussey, a very ordinary and devoted young woman with whom Bront corresponded all through her life. After the author passed away, Nussey carefully protected the reputation of her friend, in part by meticulously editing her letters. Mary Taylor, Bront's other acquaintance, was just as liberal as Nussey was conservative. Taylor, who was more brash, opinionated, and intellectual than Nussey, seems to have appealed to Bront's brilliant, rebellious, and ambitious side. Taylor stated that women's first responsibility should be to set themselves up for financial support in The First Duty of Women (1870), which she wrote toward the end of her life. She had taken action based on this conviction in 1845 by emigrating to New Zealand, where she maintained a prosperous shop until she returned to England in 1860 to live out the remainder of her days in comfortable financial independence. It is regrettable that only one of Bronte's several letters to Taylor has survived.⁷
Although Bront entered the school well behind the majority of the other girls, she immediately rose to the top of the class and remained there until she graduated 18 months later, taking home numerous awards and trophies for exceptional academic accomplishment. Bronte frequently continued her studies while the other girls were unwinding at the end of the day, showing that she understood the need of investing in her education as she was not just attending Miss Wooler's school to get polish but rather to prepare herself for a job as a governess. She only produced three poems while she was a student because of her commitment to her education. Bront eventually returned to the fascinating world of Angria and the profession of writing after leaving Roe Head in May 1832. While living at Haworth, she was responsible for overseeing the education of her younger sisters. She wrote over 2,200 lines of poetry between 1833 and 1834, the most of it deeply entwined with the emotional narratives she and Branwell were creating about the political and romantic experiences of their cherished Angrians. Many of these poems are songs, and understanding their meaning and impact requires an understanding of the singer's persona as well as the context in which the lyrics are being performed. Other poems are long narratives that advance the stories introduced in the accompanying prose narratives and deepen and occasionally complicate the Angrian saga. These poems are more technically proficient than the ones she wrote before coming to Roe Head, but they also exhibit less experimentation with poetry form and more focus on the themes and characters in the stories. Her earlier works' literary self-reflection gave way to an almost complete immersion in the realm of Angrian fantasy, which placed a strong focus on military combat (primarily Branwell's contribution) and romantic betrayal (Charlotte's primary interest).
The few exceptions to Bront's Angrian writings include a collection of poetry written on lined paper in regular-sized script, possibly from the same notebook, and preceded by her father's instructions: "All that is written in this book, must be in a good, plain and legible hand. PB.” These non-Angrian poems, including "Saul," "Death of Darius Codomanus," and "Richard Coeur de Lion & Blondel," may indicate that Bront understood the need to create a public poetic mode to go along with the private writing she and her siblings relished in their creative aspirations. As a result, the evidence of conflict in Bront's poetry connects literary differences—in poetic modes, voices, subject matters, even penmanship—with a perceived separation between a private life of communication with a coterie audience, her siblings, and a public life of duty to authority figures, like her father and teachers (the poems on historical and Biblical figures are similar to school exercises she later wrote in Brussels). Bront finally chose prose fiction over poetry as a result of this separation, but not before she had developed tremendous poetic talent and battled through a great deal of anxiety over this perceived conflict between the call of the private imagination and the call of public duty. There was little opportunity to "act out" the Angrian tales in Miss Wooler's school, which is why it was decided that Bront should return to Roe Head as a teacher in July 1835. According to her notebook, Bront grew increasingly bitter about her "wretched bondage" to the teaching profession due to its demanding schedule, lack of privacy, and tiresome tasks. It is understandable that her rate of production at this time was significantly lower than that of her partner, Branwell, who had set up shop in a Halifax studio with the intention of making a living as a portrait painter and who had found plenty of time for both writing and socializing. She could only write in short bursts and during vacations.