CHARLOTTE, EMILY and ANNE BRONTE

The Bronte sisters were exceptional writers of poetry as well as fiction. Between 1847 and 1848, all three sisters published novels. They all wrote under different names because “good” women were not allowed to write: Emily Bronte became Ellis Bell; Charlotte Bronte, Currer Bell; Anne Bronte, Acton Bell.

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte is one of the most famous of their novels. The story tells of the destructive and passionate love between two children, Catherine and Heathcliff, who grow up on a farm called Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff leaves the farm when Catherine, for reasons of class, refuses to marry him.

Charlotte Brontë is best known for her novel Jane Eyre (1847), which tells the story of an orphaned girl who falls in love with a married man. The main protagonists of the book, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, are portrayed with a complexity uncommon in fiction of the time.

All three sisters died very young. The house where they.lived is now a museum and you can walk from it over the Yorkshire moors to the farm where Wuthering Heights is set.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

Jane Austen spent her short life in Hampshire, near the south coast of England. In her six full-length novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817), and Northanger Abbey (published 1817 but written before the others)– she created the comedy of manners of middle-class English life in her time.

Her novels describe the everyday life of people in the upper-middle class circles she knew best. Money and social position were very important and the only role of a woman of that class was to find a rich husband.

Her characters spend most of the time in the countryside, doing little or no work. Occasionally they go to London; sometimes they go to Bath, a fashionable town. Her novels may sound boring, but they are a record of what life was like for the upper-middle class in the early nineteenth century and are among the finest and most entertaining novels written at the time.