Unit 7 The Victorian Age

(1832—1902)

l Key Words: Victorian Age; Critical Realism; Thackeray & Vanity Fair; Charles Dickens; Brontë Sisters; George Eliot; Alfred Tennyson

l Target: The students are supposed to get the basic literary history of the Victorian Age (Critical Realism in English literature), the important figures of this period and their works.

l Study Points:

1. Critical Realism;

2. William Makepeace Thackeray;

3. Charles Dickens;

4. Brontë Sisters;

5. George Eliot;

6. Alfred Tennyson;

7. The Brownings

l Time Span: 3 weeks

I. Historical background

The literature produced between 1837 and 1901 is usually referred to as Victoria literature. (the time when Queen Victoria was in reign; (There is another split of time, that is 1832—1902, for the Reform Bill was passed in 1832 and the Boer War was ended in 1902.

Reform Bill (1832)

① Most grown-up men have the right to vote;

② reduce the nobility’s privileges.

Ø The Victorian Age was a period of growth, development and reform.

– the urbanization of England

– the further development of Industrial Revolution

– England became the most powerful nation in the world.

– Workers became a powerful class. (In 1834, there was the passage of the Poor Law. According to it, the inhuman work-houses were established, in which the poor people had to do heavy tasks and live no better than in jails.)

– Labour movements, workers’ unions, the Chartist movement, reforms (In 1836, rising of the working-class movement known as: Chartist Movement”.)

Ø The ideological background

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species led to the Social Darwinism that justified free competition and the superiority of the rich over the poor.

The women question became important.

Ø Literature of the Age

• The Victorian literature stands only next to that of the Elizabethan and Romanticism. This age produced lots of great writers, such as novelists (Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot), poets (Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold) and essayists (Carlyle and Ruskin). Diversity in form and content, different literary trends as well as variety in style and subject matter characterized the Victorian literature.

• There was no dominant literary theory in Victorian literature. Some of the important literary trends are:

– (1) Chartist literature, the product of the Chartist Movement;

– (2) the flourishing of critical realistic novels from Dickens to Hardy, the greatest achievement of the century.

– (3) poetry written by the Big Three (Tennyson, Browning and Arnold);

– (4) Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood under the leadership of Dante Gabriel Rossetti;

– (5) Aesthetic Movement at the end of the century noted for the theory of "art for art's sake (Oscar Wilde).

– In addition, Victorian literature is also characterized by its variety in style and subject matter, which reflects an absence of any final general agreement concerning the function of literature and art in a democratic society.

Ø Major features of Victorian literature

• It is an age of prose, with its realistic novels which reflect the modern ideals and problems. Most novelists were realists striving to tell the truth.

• Most literary works, either prose or poetry, have a moral purpose.

• Lots of writers are optimists, not pessimists.

II. Novel—The English Critical Realism

(1840s—the early 1850s)

① Critical realists did not provide practical solution to social evils. They are reformists rather than revolutionaries.

② Critical realities composed their works from democratic and humanistic or humanitarianistic point of view.

③ Their works were characterized by compromise and reconciliation.

1. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—1863)

Ø Life

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in 1811, in Calcutta, India, in the family of an English official. But he received his education in England. He studied at Cambridge, but he left it without taking a degree. He had a talent for Cartoon-drawing.

The failure of an Indian bank where he had deposited his fortune inherited from his father, left him without means and he turned to journalism for a living.

His first literary success came with a series of satirical sketches entitled The Snobs of England which exposes snobbery as the chief vice prevailing in the bourgeois-aristocratic world.

In the forties Thackeray wrote his masterpiece Vanity Fair which was the peak of his literary career.

Ø Vanity Fair

In this novel Thackeray presents a vivid, precise and compressive picture of life of the ruling classes of England in the early decades of the 19^th Century. There are hardly any positive characters in Vanity Fair, so it is called “a novel without hero”. There are also no common people in the novel.

2. Charles Dickens (1812—1870)

Ø Life

Charles Dickens, the greatest representative of the English critical realism, was born in 1812 at Portsmouth. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. When he was very young, he read a lot of literary works which kept his fancy alive and his hope of something beyond that place and that time.

In 1821, Dickens’ father was heavily in debt and taken to prison. Shortly afterwards Dickens’ mother and the younger children went to join his father. Meanwhile, the 12-year-old Charles was sent to work in an underground cellar at a blacking factory. This was the most unhappy time of all his life. Then his fortune took a turn for the better. He left the blacking factory and studied at the school again. When he was 15, he left school and became a lawyer’s clerk. Then he became a parliamentary reporter for newspaper, through which, he gained a first-hand knowledge of the parliamentary government and got to know the life in general.

In 1842, Dickens made a trip to America and got an unfavorable impression of the life in the U. S. A., which were reflected in some of his works. Since 1844 he had spent much time on the European continent. The great social movements in the middle of 19^th century inspired Dickens’ famous novel of social criticism. In 1859, he published his historical novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities. In 1867—1868, Dickens made his second trip to America. Back in England, he started his last work Edwin Drood which remained unfinished.

Ø Dickens’ Novels

1) The First Period (1836—1841): Naïve optimism

– Sketch By Boz (1836)

– The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837)

– Oliver Twist (1837-1838)

– Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839)

– The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)

– Barnaby Rudge (1841)

In Dickens’ first period, and especially in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, fun, high spirited, and a tendency even to literary boisterous play—alternating sometimes with spells of sentimentality—strikes the dominant note. During this period, Dickens thought that the whole social question would be settled if only every employer reformed himself according to the model set by the benevolent gentlemen in his novels. This naïve optimism is characteristic of the petty-bourgeois humanitarians of his time.

① The Pickwick Papers

a. It gives a rather comprehensive picture of early 19^th century England;

b. Artistic features of dickens’ novel writing:

An encyclopedic knowledge of London;

Inexhaustible powers of character creation;

A strong narrative impulse;

A highly individual and inventive prose style.

c. The novel does not seem to have deep hatred for the bourgeois society as a whole, and it is not satire but humor that dominates the novel. Sometimes Dickens represents the life of the English society in an idyllic light. All this expresses the naïve, youthful optimism, the joy of living, and the lightness of heart.

② Oliver Twist

a. In the preface to the novel, Dickens proclaims himself a realist. In this novel, he made his reader aware of the inhumanity of city life under capitalism and voiced the helpless sufferings of the poor and oppressed.

b. The novel is a powerful exposure of bourgeois society.

c. The inconsistency in the novel: severe criticism of nobility’s deeds to poor people; not in favour of bloody revolution (humanistic or humanitarianism and reconciliation.)

d. The chief defects of the novel include the improbability of the plot and the unconvincingness of some characters. From these defects, we can see Dickens cherished some illusion about rich and idle people. He believed the whole social question would be settled if only every employer followed the example set by “good gentlemen” like Pickwick and Brownlow.

2) The Second Period (1842—1850) darker

– American Notes (1842)

– Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1845)

– Three Christmas books:

• A Christmas Carol (1843)

• The Chimes (184)

• The Cricket on the Hearth (1844)

– Dombey and Son (1846-48)

– David Copperfield (1849-50)

Dickens’ second period began from 1842, the year after his first visit to America. During his stay in America, what impressed him most was the rule of dollars and the enormously corrupting influence of wealth and power. Dickens’ naïve optimism about capitalist society was profoundly shaken.

David Copperfield

① It is written in the first person and is the most autobiographical of his books. He made good use of his own life experience to expose the social evils of the day.

② In this novel, good characters are forced to face hardships and to suffer most cruelly, while the bad characters do not suffer so much.

③ Dickens’ democratic viewpoint shows itself in the class-orientation of the novel.

3) The Third Period (1851—1870): Darkness and bitterness

– Bleak House (1852-53)

– Hard Times (1854)

– Little Dorrit (1855-57)

– A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

– Great Expectations (1860-61)

– Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)

– Edwin Drood (1870)

It began with the publication of Bleak House in 1852—1853. There was an “underlying tone of bitterness” which showed Dickens’ loss of hope for English bourgeois society.

A Tale of Two Cities

① The theme underlying A Tale of Two Cities is the idea “where there is oppression, there is revolution.”

② In this novel, the character of Dr. Manette is a representative of bourgeois intellectuals who had hoped for a revolution, but recoiled aghast before the excesses of the French Revolution.

③ The inconsistency in the novel: severe criticism of nobility’s deeds to poor people; not in favour of bloody revolution (humanistic or humanitarianism and reconciliation.)

Ø Summary

The features of Dickens’ works:

① Character sketches and exaggeration: Very few English writers have created such a great number of living characters as Dickens. There are about 19 hundred figures, some of them are really "typical characters under typical circumstances," that they become proverbial or representative of a whole group of similar persons.

② Dickens was a master of characterization, skillful in drawing vivid caricatural sketches by exaggerating some peculiarities, and in giving them exactly the actions for the right person. George Eliot wrote that he "can with a phrase make a character as real as flesh and blood."

③ Broad (low or obvious) humor and penetrating satire: Well known as a humorist and satirist, Dickens employs humor to enliven a scene or lighten a character by making the scene or person eccentric, whimsical (strange and unpredictable), or laughable. Satire, the effect of which is achieved by the use of irony and obvious exaggeration, is employed to ridicule human follies or vices, aiming at laughing them out of existence of bringing about reform.

④ sentimentality (overflow of emotion and sentiment)

⑤ cleverly knitted plot: Complicated and fascinating (coincidence)

A. Dickens seems to love complicated novel constructions with minor plots beside the major one, or two parallel major plots within one novel. The stories are made fascinating by his skilful use of suspense and mystery.

B. Dickens was generally quite optimistic, so the plots of Dickens' novels usually have a happy ending. The good are rewarded and the bad punished, although the former may suffer and the latter may temporarily gain the upper hand in the course of the story. Nevertheless, in his later works, as he became increasingly pessimistic, the happy ending seems unnatural.

⑥ a master of language: The power of exposure: As the most representative figure of English critical realists, Dickens made his novels the instrument of morality and justice. In his novels, he did more than any other writers of his age to correct the general selfishness and injustice of society toward the poor. Every one of his novels reveals a particular social problem.

2. Some Women Novelists

Jane Austin (1775—1817)

Her works were regarded as realistic works, but they have a tendency of classicism, because in her novel, she emphasized reason. (More in Unit 6)

The Brontë Sisters

Charlotte, Emily and Anne are the three among five daughters of Patrick Brontë, a Yorshire clergyman of Irish origin. All the daughters seem to have been gifted, and all died with their single brother before their father; their mother died in 1821.

1) Charlotte Brontë (1816—1855)

• In 1846 Charlotte, with Emily and Anne Brontë, published a volume of poetry under the pen-names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; only Emily's verse is particularly noteworthy.

• Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was not published until after her death; her second, Jane Eyre (1847), was immediately successful.

• Her third novel, Shirley, came out in 1849, Villette, based on her period of teaching in Brussels, in 1853.

• Villette is her most mature. The impressiveness of her writing comes from the struggle--experienced by herself, related through her heroines in Jane Eyre and Villette--to preserve her independence of spirit in circumstances which are overwhelmingly adverse.

• Her novels are often seen to be autobiographical ones.

• Jane Eyre continues to be successful, and Villete is increasingly esteemed.

• The Professor is really Villette in an earlier and more imperfect form; and Shirley, the only one not to have autobiographical form, is less admired.

• Like Anne and Emily, Charlotte has been the focus of attention for modern feminist critics and the confined and restless imagery of their novels is often seen as representative of the anger of suppressed and misrepresented women.

Ø Jane Eyre

• This novel is in the form of a fictional autobiographical experience, with some authentic autobiographical experience.

• The experiences of the penniless, unattractive child at first in the household of her unfeeling aunt Mrs. Reed and later at Lowood Asylum--a charitable school--are the subject of the earlier and most generally admired part of the book.

• Later she becomes governess to the ward of a rich landowner, Mr. Rochester, whose terrible secret is his mad wife; this part of the story is a mixture of romantic love, romantic horror and social naiveté, together with a truthfulness to feeling which still keeps the heroine convincing and interesting.

• In the third section, Jane is sought in marriage by a clergyman, St John Rivers, a man of rigoroous honor and ideals, whom she refuses after a telepathic communication from Rochester because, unlike the passionate but morally imperfect Rochester, he does not love her.

• Her marriage to Rochester at the end of the book is again oddly compounded of naiveté, romanticism, self-deception and truthfulness.

• The novel was in more than one respect an innovation:

– It ran contrary to the puritanic tradition that a good woman did not need to fell physical passion or require it I her lover;

– it presented a romantic heroine whose nature and appearance it is impossible to sentimentalize or idealize;

– it is the first novel told in the first person in which the narrator's personality is not just a window through which the events are seen but also defines the quality of the events as we experience then through her mind.

• Jane Eyre was the text which acted as a catalyst in feminist criticism in the 1980s through the medium of S. Gilbert and S. Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), in which the unstable female characters in texts written by women were seen as doubles of the same heroine and products of the suppression of the feminine.

• both a novelist and a poet.

• described as the finest woman poet in English literature.

2) Emily Brontë (1818—1848) & Wuthering Heights

• It is, however, for her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), that she is chiefly famous.

• The novel is unique in its structure and its vision; the former is so devised that the story comes through several independent narrators.

• Her vision is such that she brings human passions (through her characters Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw) against society (represented by the households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange) with extraordinary violence, while at the same time retaining a cool artistic control.

• This enables the reader to experience a highly intelligent criticism of society's implicit claim to absorb all the energies of the individual, who potentially is larger in spirit than society ever can. Initially received as morbid and too violent, it has grown in critical stature, particularly with regard to its structure.

• It is the sole novel by Emily Brontë.

Ø Wuthering Heights

• The title of the book is the name of an old house, high up in the Yorkshire moors, occupied by the Earnshaw family.

• The period is the very end of the 18^th century. Into this house Mr. Earnshaw brings a child who has been living the life of a wild animal in the slums of Liverpool.

• His parents are quite unknown and Earnshaw adopts him, giving him the single name of Heathcliff.

• However, Mr. Earnshaw treats him less like a himan being than like an over-indulged pet animal; this arouses the fierce resentment of his son Hindley and it is only with the daughter Catherine (Cathy) that Heathcliff has a human relationship.

• After Mr. Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is maltreated by Hindley, now master of the house, and lives like a despised animal instead of a spoilt one; his strong bond with Cathy, however, remains.

• But Cathy marries Edgar Linton from the "civilized" household of Trushcross Grange in the valley. Heathcliff runs away and is heard of no more for three years.

• During this period Cathy and Edgar are countented together, though she has fits of depression.

• When Heathcliff returns, he has become a rich man but is as socially excluded as ever, as deeply identified with Cathy, and full of hatred for the Linton and the Earnshaw families, which he sets about to destroy, especially after the death of Cathy in giving birth to a daughter.

• He nearly succeeds in doing so but has to withhold harm from Hareton Earnshaw, the son of Hindley, and Catherine Linton, the daughter of Cathy, who are deeply in love. Heathcliff becomes detached from external reality and lives only for his union with Cathy in death. On the last page a weeping little boy declares that he has seen the ghosts of the dead Heathcliff and Cathy walking on the moor.

• Emily Brontë's aim seems to have been to present an image of the feminine personality under the social constrictions of the civilization of the time.

• Cathy rather than Heathcliff is the central character.

• Women were not supposed to possess the wilder, instinctive feelings which were acknowledged in men; and girls' training, among the middle and upper classes, was a systematic inhibition of anything of the sort.

• Cathy, however, has this element in herself awakened by her early association with Heathcliff and though her marriage with Edgar Linton is in many ways ideal both personally and socially, she can never afterwards be fully herself: "Nelly, I am Heathcliff."

• Heathcliff, on the other hand, represents the savage forces in human beings which civilization attempts vainly to eliminate them.

• Much of the interest of the book lies in the brilliant complexity of the structure, the dual narrative, time shifts and flashbacks, as well as the original handling of Gothic and Romantic elements, and how they color the evocation of houses and landscapes.

3) Ann Brontë (1820—1849)

Ø Works

– Agnes Grey (1847)

– The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall (1849)

3. George Eliot (1819—1880)

Ø Life

• George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans.

• She was the daughter of a land-agent in the rural midlands; her father's work (the management of estates) gave her wide experience of country society and this was greatly to enrich her insight and the scope of her novels.

• Brought up in a narrow religious tradition, in her early twenties she adopted agnostic opinions about Christian doctrine but she remained steadfast in the ethical teachings associated with it.

• She began her literary career with translations from the German of two works of religious speculation; in 1851, she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a journal of great intellectual prestige in London.

• Her friendship with George Lewes led to a union between them which they both regarded as amounting to marriage; this was a bold decision in view of the rigid opposition in the English society of the time to open unions not legalized by the marriage ceremony.

Ø Works

• Her first fiction consisted of tales later collected together as Scenes of Clerical Life.

• Then came her series of full-length novels:

– Adam Bede (1859), (《亚当·毕德》)

– The Mill on the Floss (1860), (《弗洛斯河上的磨房》)

– Silas Marner (1865), (《织工马南传》)

– Romola (1862-3),

– Felix Holt (1866),

– Middlemarch (1871-2) and,

– Daniel Deronda (1876).

• Up till Romola the novels and tales deal with life in the countryside in which she was brought up; the society is depicted as a strong and stable one, and the novelist combines in an unusual degree sharp, humorous observation and intelligent imaginative sympathy.

• Romola marks a dividing point; it is a historical novel about the society of the Italian city of Florence in the 15^th century.

• As a work of imaginative literature it is usually regarded as scholarly but dead; however, it seems to have opened the way to the more comprehensive treatment of English society in her last three novels.

• In Romola the relationship of the individual to society is interpreted with an intelligence outstanding in the history of English novel and often compared with the genius of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

• Her critical reputation has varied; it declined somewhat after her death, her powerful intellect being considered to damage her creativity.

• She was defended by Virginia Woolf in an essay in 1919, but was really re-established by inclusion in F. R, Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948).

• With the rapid strides in feminist criticism in the 1980s, however, Eliot has been reclaimed as a major influence on women's writing and her works have been the focus of numerous feminist critiques, eg. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). George Eliot also wrote poems, but they were little regarded.

Ø Summary

① She was in a way a philosopher, and a reformist, but her reform lies in religion;

② Her characters were not grotesque types, but real, common men and women, whose psychology Elliot revealed very skillfully to the reader;

③ Her work marks a retrogression. She shifted the centre of gravity in the novel from the social problems to the problems of religion and morality. She did not attack the social system, but believed in the sentimental “religion of humanity”, and cherished the illusion that humanity and love could do away with the evils of capitalism.

Ø PowerPoint of Women Novelists (Click and Enter)

III. Poetry in Victorian Age

Alfred Tennyson (1809—1892)

He was the poet laureate and spokesman of the Victorian age. He was a man of energetic character, remarkable for his strength and his various talents. He wrote poems when he was 18. After his death in 1892, he was buried in the “Poet’s Corner” in Westminster Abbey near Geoffrey Chaucer, besides the great contemporary Robert Browning.

Ø Works

– The Princess, (《公主》)

– In Memoriam, (“Break, Break, Break”) (《悼念》)

– Idylls of the King, (《国王之歌》)

– Maud, (《毛黛》)

Break, Break, Break

This is a lyric, the first expression of his profound personal grief on hearing of the death of Arthur H. Hallam, his closest friend and the fiancé of his sister. Tennyson said it was composed “in a Lincolnshire Lane at five o’clock in the morning between blossoming hedges”. The actual theme of this poem is he stood in the Clevedon Church on a solitary hill overlooking the British Channel where Hallam was buried.

Robert Browning (1812—1889)

Ø Works

– Paracelsus, (《巴拉塞尔士》)

– Strafford (《斯特拉福德》)

– Pippa Passes (《皮帕经过》)

– Home Thoughts from Abroad, (《异国乡思》)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806—1861)

Ø Works

– Sonnets from the Portuguese

– Lady Geraldine’s Courtship

– The Cry of the Children

Reference Books:

1. Liu Bingshan: A Short History of English Literature, Zhenzhou: Henan People’s Publishing House,2000

2. Wu Weiren: History and Anthology of English Literature, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1998

3. 李正栓，李翠葶：《英国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002

4. 万莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001.

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– the urbanization of England

– the further development of Industrial Revolution

– England became the most powerful nation in the world.

– Workers became a powerful class. (In 1834, there was the passage of the Poor Law. According to it, the inhuman work-houses were established, in which the poor people had to do heavy tasks and live no better than in jails.)

– Labour movements, workers’ unions, the Chartist movement, reforms (In 1836, rising of the working-class movement known as: Chartist Movement”.)

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species led to the Social Darwinism that justified free competition and the superiority of the rich over the poor.

The women question became important.

• There was no dominant literary theory in Victorian literature. Some of the important literary trends are:

– (1) Chartist literature, the product of the Chartist Movement;

– (2) the flourishing of critical realistic novels from Dickens to Hardy, the greatest achievement of the century.

– (3) poetry written by the Big Three (Tennyson, Browning and Arnold);

– (4) Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood under the leadership of Dante Gabriel Rossetti;

– (5) Aesthetic Movement at the end of the century noted for the theory of "art for art's sake (Oscar Wilde).

– In addition, Victorian literature is also characterized by its variety in style and subject matter, which reflects an absence of any final general agreement concerning the function of literature and art in a democratic society.

• It is an age of prose, with its realistic novels which reflect the modern ideals and problems. Most novelists were realists striving to tell the truth.

• Most literary works, either prose or poetry, have a moral purpose.

• Lots of writers are optimists, not pessimists.

1. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—1863)

2. Charles Dickens (1812—1870)

– Sketch By Boz (1836)

– The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837)

– Oliver Twist (1837-1838)

– Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839)

– The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)

– Barnaby Rudge (1841)

– American Notes (1842)

– Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1845)

– Three Christmas books:

• A Christmas Carol (1843)

• The Chimes (184)

• The Cricket on the Hearth (1844)

– Dombey and Son (1846-48)

– David Copperfield (1849-50)

– Bleak House (1852-53)

– Hard Times (1854)

– Little Dorrit (1855-57)

– A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

– Great Expectations (1860-61)

– Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)

– Edwin Drood (1870)

2. Some Women Novelists

Jane Austin (1775—1817)

• In 1846 Charlotte, with Emily and Anne Brontë, published a volume of poetry under the pen-names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; only Emily's verse is particularly noteworthy.

• Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was not published until after her death; her second, Jane Eyre (1847), was immediately successful.

• Her third novel, Shirley, came out in 1849, Villette, based on her period of teaching in Brussels, in 1853.

• Villette is her most mature. The impressiveness of her writing comes from the struggle--experienced by herself, related through her heroines in Jane Eyre and Villette--to preserve her independence of spirit in circumstances which are overwhelmingly adverse.

• Her novels are often seen to be autobiographical ones.

• Jane Eyre continues to be successful, and Villete is increasingly esteemed.

• The Professor is really Villette in an earlier and more imperfect form; and Shirley, the only one not to have autobiographical form, is less admired.

• Like Anne and Emily, Charlotte has been the focus of attention for modern feminist critics and the confined and restless imagery of their novels is often seen as representative of the anger of suppressed and misrepresented women.

• This novel is in the form of a fictional autobiographical experience, with some authentic autobiographical experience.

• The experiences of the penniless, unattractive child at first in the household of her unfeeling aunt Mrs. Reed and later at Lowood Asylum--a charitable school--are the subject of the earlier and most generally admired part of the book.

• In the third section, Jane is sought in marriage by a clergyman, St John Rivers, a man of rigoroous honor and ideals, whom she refuses after a telepathic communication from Rochester because, unlike the passionate but morally imperfect Rochester, he does not love her.

• Her marriage to Rochester at the end of the book is again oddly compounded of naiveté, romanticism, self-deception and truthfulness.

• The novel was in more than one respect an innovation:

– It ran contrary to the puritanic tradition that a good woman did not need to fell physical passion or require it I her lover;

– it presented a romantic heroine whose nature and appearance it is impossible to sentimentalize or idealize;

– it is the first novel told in the first person in which the narrator's personality is not just a window through which the events are seen but also defines the quality of the events as we experience then through her mind.

• both a novelist and a poet.

• described as the finest woman poet in English literature.

• It is, however, for her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), that she is chiefly famous.

• The novel is unique in its structure and its vision; the former is so devised that the story comes through several independent narrators.

• Her vision is such that she brings human passions (through her characters Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw) against society (represented by the households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange) with extraordinary violence, while at the same time retaining a cool artistic control.

• It is the sole novel by Emily Brontë.

Ø Wuthering Heights

• The title of the book is the name of an old house, high up in the Yorkshire moors, occupied by the Earnshaw family.

• The period is the very end of the 18th century. Into this house Mr. Earnshaw brings a child who has been living the life of a wild animal in the slums of Liverpool.

• His parents are quite unknown and Earnshaw adopts him, giving him the single name of Heathcliff.

• However, Mr. Earnshaw treats him less like a himan being than like an over-indulged pet animal; this arouses the fierce resentment of his son Hindley and it is only with the daughter Catherine (Cathy) that Heathcliff has a human relationship.

• After Mr. Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is maltreated by Hindley, now master of the house, and lives like a despised animal instead of a spoilt one; his strong bond with Cathy, however, remains.

• But Cathy marries Edgar Linton from the "civilized" household of Trushcross Grange in the valley. Heathcliff runs away and is heard of no more for three years.

• During this period Cathy and Edgar are countented together, though she has fits of depression.

• When Heathcliff returns, he has become a rich man but is as socially excluded as ever, as deeply identified with Cathy, and full of hatred for the Linton and the Earnshaw families, which he sets about to destroy, especially after the death of Cathy in giving birth to a daughter.

• Emily Brontë's aim seems to have been to present an image of the feminine personality under the social constrictions of the civilization of the time.

• Cathy rather than Heathcliff is the central character.

• Women were not supposed to possess the wilder, instinctive feelings which were acknowledged in men; and girls' training, among the middle and upper classes, was a systematic inhibition of anything of the sort.

• Cathy, however, has this element in herself awakened by her early association with Heathcliff and though her marriage with Edgar Linton is in many ways ideal both personally and socially, she can never afterwards be fully herself: "Nelly, I am Heathcliff."

• Heathcliff, on the other hand, represents the savage forces in human beings which civilization attempts vainly to eliminate them.

• Much of the interest of the book lies in the brilliant complexity of the structure, the dual narrative, time shifts and flashbacks, as well as the original handling of Gothic and Romantic elements, and how they color the evocation of houses and landscapes.

– Agnes Grey (1847)

• The period is the very end of the 18^th century. Into this house Mr. Earnshaw brings a child who has been living the life of a wild animal in the slums of Liverpool.

• Romola marks a dividing point; it is a historical novel about the society of the Italian city of Florence in the 15^th century.