Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63)

English novelist and humorist, one of the foremost exponents of the 19th-century realistic novel, exemplified by his two most famous works, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. Thackeray was born July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. In 1829 Thackeray entered the University of Cambridge. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he attempted to develop his literary and artistic abilities, first as the editor of a short-lived journal and subsequently as an art student in Paris. In 1840 Thackeray produced The Paris Sketchbook, a series of reprints of his contributions to various literary journals. After joining the staff of the humorous journal Punch in 1842, he published the Irish Sketchbook in 1843 and Cornhill to Cairo in 1847.

Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair early in 1847, quickly establishing a reputation as one of the major literary figures of his time. In other novels – Henry Esmond (1852), The Virginians (1857)—he broadened his observation of social situations to various eras and locales. These widely acclaimed works brought Thackeray new recognition. He became a principal competitor of his great contemporary, Charles Dickens, with whom he frequently disagreed on the nature of the novel as a vehicle for social commentary. After lecturing in the U.S., Thackeray edited the Cornhill Magazine (1860-62). He contributed two of his lesser novels to the journal, and his work with the magazine suggested ideas for his humorous essays, The Roundabout Papers. In 1862 he gave up his editorship because he was unwilling to refuse manuscripts, but he continued to work for the magazine, beginning his last novel, Denis Duval, shortly before his death on December 24, 1863, in London. Thackeray is particularly noted for his exquisitely humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper classes of his time. His narrative skill and vivid characterizations are strikingly evident in his masterpiece Vanity Fair, an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England. The character of Becky Sharp, a scheming adventuress, is drawn with consummate skill, serving as a model for the heroines of many later novels. Thackeray's keen awareness of social eccentricity is seen also in his short works, especially in The Rose and the Ring (1855), in which his own clever drawings accent the text.

12.3. “Женская литература” викторианской эпохи. Феномен семьи Бронте. «Джен Эйр»: роман-автобиография. «Грозовой перевал»: контраст реалистической и романтической манер письма. Элизабет Браунинг и Кристина Росетти.

Bronte, name of three English novelists, also sisters, whose works, transcending Victorian conventions, have become beloved classics. The sisters Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily (Jane) Bronte (1818-1848), and Anne Bronte (1820-1849), and their brother (Patrick) Branwell Bronte (1817-1848), were born in Thornton, Yorkshire: Charlotte on April 21, 1816, Emily on July 30, 1818, and Anne on March 17, 1820. Their father, Patrick Bronte, who had been born in Ireland, was appointed rector of Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors; it was with Haworth that the family was thenceforth connected. In 1824, when their mother died, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School in Cowan Bridge; this was the original on which was modeled the infamous Lowood School of Charlotte Brontл's novel Jane Eyre. Maria and Elizabeth returned to Haworth ill and died in 1825. Charlotte and Emily were later taken away from the school due to the grim conditions and the sisters' illness. The Broneл children's imaginations transmuted a set of wooden soldiers into characters in a series of stories they wrote about the imaginary kingdom of Angria—the property of Charlotte and Branwell—and the kingdom of Gondal—which belonged to Emily and Anne. A hundred tiny handwritten volumes (started in 1829) of the chronicles of Angria survive, but nothing of the Gondal saga (started in 1834), except some of Emily's poems. The relationship of these stories to the later novels is a matter of much interest to scholars.

Charlotte went away to school again, in Roe Head, in 1831, returning home a year later to continue her education and teach her sisters. She returned to Roe Head in 1835 as a teacher, taking Emily with her. In 1842, conceiving the idea of opening a small private school of their own, and to improve their French, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to a private boarding school. The death of their aunt, who had kept house for the family, compelled their return, however. Emily stayed at Haworth as housekeeper. Anne became governess in a family near York, where she was joined as tutor by Branwell, who had failed first as a portrait painter and then as a railway clerk. Charlotte went back to Brussels, her experiences there forming the basis of the rendering, in Villette (1853), of Lucy Snowe's loneliness, longing and isolation. In 1845 the family was together again. Branwell, who had been dismissed from his tutorship, presumably because he had fallen in love with his employer's wife, was resorting increasingly to opium and drink. Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems led to the decision to have the sisters' verses published; these appeared, at their own expense, as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), each sister using her own initials in these pseudonyms. Two copies were sold. Each sister then embarked on a novel. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was published first, in 1847; Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights appeared a little later that year. Speculation about the authors' identities was rife until they visited London and met their publishers.

On their return to Haworth they found Branwell near death. Emily caught cold at his funeral, and died December 19, 1848. Anne too died, on May 28, 1849. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, had been published the year before; the account of a drunkard's degeneration, it was as deeply rooted in personal observation as Agnes Grey, the study of a governess's life. Alone now with her father at Haworth, Charlotte resumed work on the novel Shirley ( 1849). This was the least successful of her novels, although its depiction of the struggle between masters and workers in the Yorkshire weaving industry a generation earlier precluded Charlotte's relying solely on intense subjectivity. This strain of realism was the source of her power, as can be seen earlier in Jane Eyre and later in Villette and The Professor (1857). In 1852, Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Pregnant in 1855, she became ill and died March 31 of that year of tuberculosis.

Since their deaths, new generations of readers have been fascinated by the circumstances of the Brontлs' lives, their untimely deaths, and their astonishing achievements. Jane Eyre's popularity has never waned; it is a passionate expression of female issues and concerns. The Brontлs' transcendent masterpiece, however, is almost certainly Emily's novel Wuthering Heights, a story of passionate love, in which irreconcilable principles of energy and calm are ultimately harmonized. Emily Bronte was a mystic, as her poetry shows, and Wuthering Heights dramatizes her intuitive apprehension of the nature of life. The first book about the Brontes, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), by her friend the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, is a classic biography.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861)

English poet, political thinker, and feminist. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and privately educated. In 1826 her An Essay on Mind and Other Poems was published anonymously. Her translation of Prometheus Bound, by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, appeared in 1833 and was highly regarded. Five years later, in The Seraphim and Other Poems, she expressed Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. She was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a volume of poems including “The Cry of the Children” and “Lady Geraldine's Courtship,” with an American edition that had an introduction by Edgar Allan Poe. These verses were so highly regarded that in 1850, when William Wordsworth died, Browning was suggested as his successor as poet laureate of England.

In 1845 the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance was bitterly opposed by her father. In 1846, however, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at age 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets, one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English, to be her best work. She expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in the collections of poems Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh (1856), in which she defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom and addresses the concerns of the female artist. This work is undergoing a critical reassessment and is newly appreciated.

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