Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronte

Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronte by Margaret Smith

These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Brontë's personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her 'master', the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother's and sisters' untimely deaths. We learn also of the progress of her writing, including the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, and of her contacts with her publishers, including the young George Smith; and we recognize in her letters the life-experiences which are transmuted into the art of her novels. Contemporary society is brilliantly described in her letters from London, when she writes of her encounters with famous writers and with critics of her novels. We hear too of her visits to art galleries, operas, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace. Dramatic letters written in December 1852 convey the 'turbulence of feeling' in the Haworth curate Arthur Nicholls's proposal of marriage to her and in Mr Brontë's violent reaction to it; and we subsequently hear of her secret correspondence with her suitor, her father's eventual consent, and her tragically brief happy marriage, cut short by her death in March 1855.

Margaret Smith's new Selected Letters is extremely welcome..it represents an impressive achievement of choice; it reads remarkably fluently, and gives us almost all of Charlotte's most powerful letters...This scholarly and affordable volume provides vivid access to Charlotte Brontë's inner life through an admirably well-chosen core of accurate, annotated texts. * Patsy Stoneman, Review of English Studies *
a very welcome selection at an affordable price... Margaret Smith has more than earned the plaudits of Brontë lovers for her patient and scrupulous work, in establishing reliable texts of Charlotte's letters, and in annotating them so expertly. * Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday *
enhances her reputation as a woman of wit and imagination * Hannah Hudson, Tribune *
a perfect introduction (or re-introduction) to Charlotte Brontë's epistolary style, a highly valuable, first-hand source of information on the author who wrote some of the most important novels in English Literature and her siblings. Reading these accurate transcriptions of Charlotte Brontë's letters is pure magic - a momentary lapse into what her correspondents might have felt. * BronteBlog *

Margaret Smith, editor of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (3 volumes, OUP, 1995-2004) and co-author with Christine Alexander of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (OUP, 2003), is a Vice-President of the Brontë Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Science, University of Birmingham.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199205875
ISBN 10	0199205876
Title	Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronte
Author	Margaret Smith
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2007-09-13
Number of pages	312
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.