Charlotte Bronte

This book was very helpful for my honor's thesis! It was recommended to me by my advisor and I could not be happier. Thanks you for the affordable and agreeable price!

This is the same book under a different title as "The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family" by the same author. If I had known that I would not have ordered it since we already have the latter book. There should have been some indication of that in information about the book.

This book was a little slow-moving in parts but as it progressed I became much more engrossed in the story of Charlotte Bronte and her family. I really found myself empathizing with this exemplary but lonely, depressed woman.I learned a great deal from this book. I read Jane Eyre when I was 13. I think I'd always assumed that perhaps Charlotte Bronte had experienced a loving, passionate marriage since she penned the story of Rochester and his Jane with such emotion. Emily Bronte also in her tale of the love between Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights makes it seem as though she too had loved passionately. But no--these women knew of love and passion in their imaginations. Emily never married. Charlotte marries towards the end of her life, but the pairing couldn't be considered the stuff of which fairy tales are made.I hadn't known that Jane Eyre was so controversial at the time it was written. A so-called "naughty book" which had tongues wagging had a heroine who refused to live with the love of her life because he was still married, even though his so-called wife was totally insane. In this day and age many people would scorn the heroine and call her a prude for abstaining from a relationship with the man she loves. It couldn't be a more moral book in my opinion, but in the nineteenth century just the fact that the heroine wanted a passionate marriage (she refused a proposed union with a missionary who valued her support as a fellow missionary more than he desired her as a woman) was too much for many nineteenth-century so-called Christians to fathom. It's painful to realize that this lonely, depressed woman who longed for love and who wrote such a fascinating, morally-upright novel should have to suffer slings and arrows from a narrow-minded society.Nineteenth-century life makes 21st-century life look like a cakewalk in some ways. The fact that not one of Mr. Bronte's children outlived him is shocking all by itself. I think about Charlotte losing her siblings one by one and left with just her father who was no companion for her, trying to write, but sick and depressed; I say that no wonder she could write such a convincingly melancholy tale of Jane Eyre, the lonely orphan. This book will tug at your heartstrings but it will make you proud of Charlotte for her long-suffering, her endurance, her kindness. You will be grateful that she had friends whom she could visit and who could visit her to shed some light on a mostly dreary existence. You may also be glad that she did acquire a husband late in life who made her feel safe and useful. This book reads very much like a novel. It is extremely detailed and one can get bogged down on occasion, but it is a very well-written account of a very fine woman.

My one and only outstanding complaint about the reissue of this excellent biography is this: readers have no indication at all that this is a reprint of the original 1988 edition. I mistakingly thought that this biography was a revised, updated version of Rebecca Fraser's "The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family" published 20 years ago and printed in the United States as well as Great Britain. It's actually the exact same book with a different title. No new disclosures, no recent information, no varying critiques or revisionist perspectives, when indeed very often an author will update their own biographical subject as new artifacts and letters are discovered - and yes, authors will update their own works as much as 20 years later; it's been done with Ives' book on Anne Boleyn; a couple of bios on F. Scott Fitzgerald; Arthur Rimbaud, etc. There's been, if not exactly a wealth of discovery on the Brontes, still some certainly very definitive works and even superior biographies since Fraser's 1988 book: Juliet Barker stands out most distinctly, and in the past decade more letters have been found, and more newspaper articles contemporary to the Brontes' time. A theory's even been offered in a very well done mid-1990's bio on Charlotte that she died from acute gastrointestinal infection and not from the results of pregnancy sickness, although it's been pretty well determined from her correspondence that she was pregnant at the time of her death. To just offer the exact same book of Rebecca Fraser's - as complete for its time as it was; as sensitive and sympathetic as she is to her subject - with an altered title can and will fool readers into purchasing a volume they already own. It did me.

Very well researched but not a particularly entertaining read, it’s a pretty academic tome. The Brontës lead a fascinating life and this book recounts it in minute detail. I just find it a bit dry. If you’re a serious student of literature, go for it. If you’re looking for lighter reading, this is not it.

and in depth appraisal of charlotte Bronte life, her family and times that I needed for my reading group. most satisfactory.

Brilliant book - love it.