What did Virginia Woolf wrote about Charlotte Bronte?

Virginia Woolf in her book The Common Reader: The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at the liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.

What did Virginia Woolf wrote about Charlotte Bronte in The Common Reader?

Charlotte Bronte has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Read all: adelaide.edu./virginia/woolf

Virginia Woolf's account of a visit to Haworth was the first of her writings to be accepted for publication (and the second to appear in print.) Woolf's article was first published in The Guardian, unsigned, on 21st December, 1904.

I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys. It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea. I should be inclined to set up an examination on Frederick the Great in place of an entrance fee; only, in that case, the house would soon have to be shut up. The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters. Read all: digital.library..edu/women/woolf/VW-Bronte

nytimesbooks/woolf-commonreader

George Smith and Lesley Stephen. (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and husband of Minny, the daughter of Thackeray)

The story of George Smith, Leslie Stephen, Sidney Lee and the first Dictionary of National Biography is a classic tale of the making of a successful work of reference which is more than the sum of its articles.

The Dictionary of National Biography was conceived in the early 1880s by George Smith, publisher of Ruskin, of the Brontës, Trollope, and many other leading nineteenth-century novelists, and of many journals including the Cornhill Magazine. Smith, happily replete with funds from publishing and from the manufacture of Apollinaris mineral water (whose spring he bought in 1873), sought fresh challenges. He enjoyed new enterprises and had an interest in biographical reference works. He inquired into the possibility of a new, English language version of the Biographie Universelle.

He discussed this with Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf) editor of his Cornhill Magazine since 1871 and as such publisher of many new authors such as Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson.


 In 1882 Smith was persuaded by Stephen that a universal biography on the scale envisaged was impracticable. As Sidney Lee, Stephen's successor as editor of the DNB, recollected, in what was in itself an admirably concise, accurate definition: Acting on Mr Stephen's advice, Mr Smith resolved to confine his efforts to the production of a complete dictionary of national biography which should supply full, accurate, and concise biographies of all noteworthy inhabitants of the British Islands and the Colonies (exclusive of living persons) from the earliest historical period to the present time. global/oxforddnb

Leslie Stephen wrote critiques of many authors and works, which were published in periodicals such as the Cornhill Magazine (of which he was editor from 1871), Fraser's Magazine and the Fortnightly Review. The Third Series, first published in 1879, includes commentaries on the works of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Kingsley and Walter Savage Landor, and the poetry of William Wordsworth. Stephen sets each writer's work in its historical context, comparing it to that of other significant authors of its era and evaluating its philosophical and moral qualities. His articles remain of great interest to scholars of early modern, Romantic and Victorian literature. abebooks/Hours-Library

Stephen’s own analysis of CB does, I think, display something like the desired balance. Here, for example, he proposes a standard against which to measure her overall achievement:

Miss Brontë, as her warmest admirers would grant, was not and did not in the least affect to be a philosophical thinker. And because a great writer, to whom she has been gratuitously compared, is strong just where she is weak, her friends have an injudicious desire to make out that the matter is of no importance, and that her comparative poverty of thought is no injury to her work. There is no difficulty in following them so far as to admit that her work is none the worse for containing no theological or philosophical disquisitions, or for showing no familiarity with the technicalities of modern science and metaphysics. But the admission by no means follows that her work does not suffer very materially by the comparative narrowness of the circle of ideas in which her mind habitually revolved. Perhaps if she had been familiar with Hegel or Sir W. Hamilton, she would have intruded undigested lumps of metaphysics, and introduced vexatious allusions to the philosophy of identity or to the principle of the excluded middle. But it is possible, also, that her conceptions of life and the world would have been enriched and harmonised, and that, without giving us more scientific dogmas, her characters would have embodied more fully the dominating ideas of the time. There is no province of inquiry–historical, scientific, or philosophical–from which the artist may not derive useful material; the sole question is whether it has been properly assimilated and transformed by the action of the poetic imagination. By attempting to define how far Miss Brontë’s powers were in fact thus bounded, we shall approximately decide her place in the great hierarchy of imaginative thinkers.

As Stephen points out: “What would Jane Eyre have done, and what would our sympathies have been, had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at Thornfield?

Read more: openlettersmonthly./leslie-stephen-charlotte-bronte

Leslie Stephen was married to Minny Thackeray, the daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray during this time. Julia developed a strong lifelong friendship with Minny’s sister Anny Thackeray. 

Harriet Marian (“Minny”) Thackeray Stephen (1840-1875) and Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) are seen here standing outdoors, probably on their wedding trip to Switzerland in 1867. Reproduction of plate 35d from Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album.
Original: albumen print,  Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College kimberlyevemusings
 sueyounghistories./leslie-stephen

 

Leslie and Julia Stephen in Grindelwald, Switzerland, 1889
by Gabriel Loppé (1825-1913)

Reproduction of plate 39e from Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album
Original: albumen print (17.0 x 12.3 cm.)
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College

Collection of literary manuscripts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Darwin, a distant cousin of Elizabeth Gaskell.

The Library holds the world’s most important collection of literary manuscripts by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), including the only complete manuscript of one of her novels (Wives and Daughters) and her celebrated biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Her archive also contains nearly 400 letters from notable figures – including Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Ruskin and many more – some of which were sent to Gaskell herself and some which she acquired for her own autograph collection. In addition there are artefacts (such as Gaskell’s inkstand) and famous portraits. Two related collections also contain significant Gaskelliana: the Jamison Family Archive, and the papers of Gaskell scholar and collector J.G. Sharps. Material from all of these collections has been digitised, along with some items which remain in the possession of Gaskell’s descendants. Together, these constitute an outstanding digital resource relating to Gaskell, her work and the circles in which she moved. luna.manchester

gaskells-novels

Elizabeth Gaskell knew Martineau and Newman, became friends with some American Unitarians, and definitely embraced the spiritual side of Unitarianism. She thought Priestley's brand of Unitarianism was cold and hard. Jesus, though not Christ, was a living presence, and the Bible remained an indispensable book. But Elizabeth Gaskell was also of the social reform school of Unitarianism, in company with Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale in England, and Theodore Parker and Dorothea Dix in this country.

Gaskell was writing at a time when the mill owners struggled against a social system in which the landowners were paramount and often charged exhorbitant rents to the industrialists. Thomas Malthus direly predicted that population would soon outstrip food supply. Utopian socialists planned alternative, cooperative societies. And Frederick Engels presented his dark picture of the situation in Manchester in "The condition of the Working Class in England." Gaskell's writing seems to us far from radical, and those on the left found her solutions paternalistic. But hers was a paternalism of aiding adult children and watching them become independent agents rather than the "Father Knows Best" paternalism prevalent at the time. In both Mary Barton and North and South she shows the folly of mill owners refusing to inform workers of even good reasons for their actions and assuming that workers wouldn't understand or had no right to know, anyway. Gaskell was one of the few writers with some sympathy for workers's unions. In North and South, she envisioned union leaders acting in an advisory capacity in the affairs of the mills.

Charles Darwin, a distant cousin of Elizabeth Gaskell, published On the Origin of Species, in 1859 and evolution was the center of the public debate throughout the 1860s. Unitarianism still was primarily the rational and scientific religion of Joseph Priestley despite the move toward more spirituality, and Unitarians welcomed the theories and as usual loved discussing Darwin's concepts. At the time, Oxford and Cambridge only allowed Anglican students, and studies concentrated there on ancient languages, literature and history. Science, as a discipline for study, was not valued. Gaskell, in Wives and Daughters illustrates the attitude with a vignette of two sons. The parents hail the eldest, a student of poetry, as the genius of the family, while they view the younger son, with a keen interest in science and nature, as slow-witted. Unitarians studied at other Universities, such as in Edinburg, that may not have been as prestigious, but had great science departments. They were among the Theory of Evolution's staunchest defenders in the early confrontations between science and religion. The Gaskells had two liberal Anglican friends at Oxford, Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison, who were charged with heresy for embracing Darwinism and denying the existence of hell. I'm not sure which outraged the Anglican establishment more, but a conviction of heresy was overturned on appeal. uufhc.net

wiki/Charles_Darwin

The Parsonage 1858

facebook/ Mick Walpole‎