The Brontës

This course examines a selection of fiction, poetry and juvenilia by nineteenth-century British writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Publishing under un-gendered pseudonyms as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the sisters produced some of the most powerful and impassioned works of their time, works which continue to have a hold on readers' imaginations even today. Collectively (with brother, Branwell) they also produced a huge corpus of juvenile writings in which they invented entire fictional worlds located in Africa. In this course we will consider them as a family of writers. What does it mean to think about them as collaborators, or co-conspirators, within a shared domestic environment? How did their childhood experience - their education, their reading, and their play - shape their work? As mature writers, all three wrote about childhood and education, servants and servitude, power and tyranny, anger and rage. Their works astonished contemporary readers for their representations of intense emotional states. On their deaths (three of the siblings died under the age of 31 - only Charlotte lived until 38), an industry emerged that sought to turn the Brontës into cultural icons - but icons of what? This course follows the Brontës and their works from childhood to death and considers their afterlives and the afterlives of their works. What does this phenomenal family tell us about nineteenth-century literature, and about ongoing conceptions of childhood and creativity?