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📂 **Category**: Fiction,Books,Culture,Anne Brontë,Charlotte Brontë,Emily Brontë
💡 **What You’ll Learn**:
7 The Professor (written 1846, published 1857) by Charlotte Brontë
This was the first novel Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of the male narrator, William Crimsworth, it presents a downbeat story of everyday middle-class struggle as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher who saw it thought it was promising, despite being too short and not “striking and exciting” enough. Did the author have anything else to offer? Fortunately, Jane Eyre – which clearly supplied the shortcomings of the previous book – was already in rehearsal and was quickly accepted. Although The Professor remained unpublished throughout Charlotte’s life, she continued to believe it was “the best I could write.” Her subtly sarcastic masculine voice reveals her essential literary sophistication.
6. Agnes Gray (1847) by Anne Brontë
In 1846, the three Brontë sisters – at their own expense – published a joint collection of poetry under the pseudonyms: Currier, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It sold only two copies. Realizing that fiction was more sellable, they decided to each write a novel under the same pseudonyms. While Charlotte was toiling on The Professor, younger sister Anne was working on Agnes Grey. She also sought to depict everyday life, but the result was more realistic because she drew directly on her personal experience working as a nanny in well-off families. The first-person heroine is initially excited at the idea of making a living for herself. But she finds herself underpaid and unappreciated by overbearing parents, while her tantrum-prone accusations include a mean little boy who likes to pull the legs of baby birds. If this story had not been overshadowed by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when it was published in 1847, it might have made more of a sensation as a Nanny Diary-style offering.
5. Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë
This flawed follow-up to Jane Eyre was written under difficult circumstances. Charlotte Branwell’s brother and two sisters fell ill and died in rapid succession while she was writing, so it was abandoned for a while before it was picked up by the bereaved author. However, this is not the only reason why this “State of England” novel – which advertises itself on the first page as “something as unromantic as Monday morning” – fails to attract readers as much as its predecessor, Jane Eyre. Its third-person narrative does not focus on a single hero or heroine, and as a result the book seems relatively diffuse, although Charlotte herself may have defended it on the grounds that real life is diffuse. Set during the Ludwig Riots of 1811–1812, the film explores social unrest, capitalism, and the “woman question.” Because of her proto-feminism, Charlotte’s ideological position is often called progressive, but in reality she was politically conservative.
4. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)
In feminist terms, Anne’s second novel is the most radical and socially engaged of all the sisters’ books. The eponymous tenant, Helen Huntingdon, is hiding out at Wildfell Hall with her young son after leaving her abusive husband. At the time, unequal marriage laws meant that it was very difficult for a woman to get a divorce at all, and it was almost impossible for her to gain custody of her children. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte makes Mr. Rochester a sexy Byronic rake; In response, Anne revealed the toxic masculinity behind this personality type. Despite the novel’s strong Christian message, its frank depiction of addiction and adultery shocked Victorian readers more than any of Brontë’s other books. Anne was more interested in reality than the ideal, and relied on her experience as a witness to Branwell’s disorderly behavior.
3 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Brontë’s first published novel, Charlotte’s melodramatic tale of the poor governess and the madwoman in the attic, became a bestseller upon first publication. Indeed, its genius lies not so much in the plot as in what J. H. Lewis, George Eliot’s future partner, one of the book’s early reviewers, described as “the strange power of self-representation.” Doing away with the device of a male narrator in favor of a female voice proved Charlotte’s creative breakthrough: it enabled her to inject an unprecedented intensity of first-person perspective into the form of the novel. However, Jane Eyre proved controversial at the time among sexist critics. Correctly assuming that the author of “Currer Bell” was a woman, they denounced the book as “rough” and the heroine as too assertive for a female.
2 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
It is mind-boggling to think that Wuthering Heights was written alongside the Professor and Agnes Gray, quite literally at the same dining room table in the Haworth rectory where the three sisters sat together to work on their first novels. Emily’s masterpiece was called “a strange book that baffles all regular criticism” upon publication. They remain mysterious, completely unique, and completely outside the norms of Victorian fiction. Rightly considered one of the greatest works in the Western canon, it is a far cry from the clichéd love story it later became in popular culture. Although horrific with violence, it is strangely devoid of sex. The writing is stunning: there are barely any adjectives and not a purple passage in sight. The Victorian poet Swinburne was right in comparing it to Greek tragedy.
1 Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)
Less known than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she returns to the Brussels material she had already used in her novel The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience studying and teaching there between 1842 and 1844. By reframing those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporates her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she felt for her Belgian mentor, Constantin Héger. Yet the result is nothing more than a naive autobiography. Instead, the film shows Charlotte pushing the classic Victorian realist novel in new artistic experimental directions. The unreliable narrator, Lucy Snow, has problems with intimacy and poses a challenge for the reader. Long before Freud, Charlotte was exploring questions about repression and the unconscious in a complex, self-defining psychological novel whose public standing hovers ambiguously between naturalism, the gothic, and autofiction. The extent to which Villette excavated and unpacked her inner life was only discovered after her death by her biographers.
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