Additional Recommended Reading

[Jessica]

More By Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre
Poor and plain, Jane Eyre begins life as a lonely orphan in the household of her hateful aunt. Despite the oppression she endures at home, and the later torture of boarding school, Jane manages to emerge with her spirit and integrity unbroken. She becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she finds herself falling in love with her employer -- the dark, impassioned Mr. Rochester. But an explosive secret tears apart their relationship, forcing Jane to face poverty and isolation once again.

The Professor
William Crimsworth, the Brontë's only male narrator, a teacher in Belgium, becomes involved in a flirtation with the headmistress of the school, but that ends when he falls in love with a student-teacher. The jealousy of the jilted headmistress creates obstacles to happiness. Considered to be the basis for Villette.

Shirley
Set during the Napoleonic wars at a time of national economic struggles, Shirley is anunsentimental yet passionate depiction of conflict among classes, sexes, and generations. Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor. As industrial unrest builds to a potentially fatal pitch, can the four be reconciled?

Additional Recommended Reading

The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell
Intertwining fact and story, The Life of Charlotte Brontë takes the reader by one hand and Charlotte Brontë by the other to run rampant through the making of one of the greatest authoresses of all time. Follow Charlotte from her birthplace of Thornton as she sets off for school and later returns to teach her sisters, and come to know the “characteristic kindness of the Brontës.”

Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
Clare Boylan
When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she left behind twenty pages of a novel that signaled her most compelling work since Jane Eyre. One hundred fifty years later, Clare Boylan has finished Brontë's novel, delivering a brilliant tale about a mysterious young girl, Matilda, who is delivered to a girls' school in provincial England. When everything about the girl's wealthy background turns out to be a fiction, it falls to a local gentleman, Mr. Ellin, and a childless widow, Isabel Chalfont, to begin a quest for her past and her identity that takes them from the drawing rooms of country society to London's seamiest alleys.

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights remains one of literature’s most disturbing explorations into the dark side of romantic passion. Heathcliff and Cathy believe they’re destined to love each other forever, but when cruelty and snobbery separate them, their untamed emotions literally consume them. Set amid the wild and stormy Yorkshire moors, this unpolished and devastating epic of childhood playmates who grow into soul mates, is widely regarded as the most original tale of thwarted desire and heartbreak in the English language.

Agnes Grey
Anne Brontë
First published in a volume that also contained Wuthering Heights, this is Anne Brontë's daring first novel. Originally quite scandalous and drawing from the author's own troubled life, this biting social commentary exposes the hardships of a governess's life.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë
The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, after a short period of initial happiness, leaves her dissolute husband, and must earn her own living to rescue her son from his influence. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society.

[inkheart79]

There are many books available to read about the turbulant lives of the Bronte's however as a scholar of the Bronte's I highly recommend reading the Belgium Essays which chronicle a very interesting stage in there lives giving them many of there plots.

After writting my thesis in college about the Bronte's and their conection with the Governess I found a tremendous ammount of reading on the subject and would be willing to share.

Happy reading

[dulcinea3]

I have all of the books that Jessica has listed, but have yet to read The Professor, Shirley, or Emma Brown.  Someday, someday...

[Jessica]

The Belgium Essays by Charlotte Brontë

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inkheart79 wrote:

There are many books available to read about the turbulant lives of the Bronte's however as a scholar of the Bronte's I highly recommend reading the Belgium Essays which chronicle a very interesting stage in there lives giving them many of there plots.

After writting my thesis in college about the Bronte's and their conection with the Governess I found a tremendous ammount of reading on the subject and would be willing to share.

Happy reading

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