The reputation of Elizabeth Gaskell is undergoing a renaissance as we enter the new millennium. The variety of her work and the range of her acquaintance makes her one of the most interesting literary figures of her century. This new collection of her letters illustrates the richness and diversity of her involvement in a remarkable range of social and literary activities. Out of the 270 letters included in this volume only 40 have been previously published.

On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine. Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing childhood creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte’s adolescence that ignited her determination to reject poverty and obscurity: While working at a girls’ school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, a man who treated her as “nothing special to him at all.” She channeled her torment into her first attempts at a novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention. Charlotte helped power her sisters’ work to publication, too. But Emily’s Wuthering Heights was eclipsed by Jane Eyre, which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Brontë’s blazingly intelligent women brimming with hidden passions would transform English literature. And she savored her literary success even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed. Charlotte Brontë is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlotte’s lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harman’s richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Brontë’s own work.

The] contradictions in Bronte] s] life are not only fully chronicled by Lyndall Gordon s splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work. . . . Gordon] chooses to use her imaginative sympathies honed to precision with earlier biographies of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot to delineate her subject s rich interior life. Michiko Kakutani, New York Times"

Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --

In the last few decades Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. The essays in this Companion draw on recent advances in biographical and bibliographical studies of Gaskell and cover the range of her impressive and varied output as a writer of novels, biography, short stories, and letters. The volume, which features well-known scholars in the field of Gaskell studies, focuses throughout on her narrative versatility and her literary responses to the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations of her time. This Companion will be invaluable for students and scholars of Victorian literature, and includes a chronology and guide to further reading.

"This book has as its subject the manipulation of a reputation." "Its starting point is Charlotte Bronte's attempt to manage her own and her sisters' public image in the face of Victorian prejudice against their passionate novels. Their first biographer, Mrs. Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one of the great legends of the nineteenth century, a dramatic tale of three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor. Lucasta Miller reveals where this image came from and how it took such a hold on the popular imagination." "Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Bronte 'biography' appearing."

The author of Jayne Eyreis brought to life by her friend and fellow novelist in “one of the most remarkable literary biographies in English prose” (The Guardian). One of the Guardian’s 100 best nonfiction books of all time First published in 1857, The Life of Charlotte Brontë presents an intimate portrait of the celebrated author through the eyes of Elizabeth Gaskell, a personal friend of Brontë’s and fellow trailblazer of Victorian-era literature. Drawing from hundreds of Brontë’s letters, Gaskell illuminates what she described as a “wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it.” Beginning with Brontë’s lonely childhood as a student at the Clergy Daughter’s School in Lancashire, Gaskell chronicles her subject’s development as a writer and first publications under the pseudonym Currer Bell, her relationship with her sisters and reluctant literary stardom, and finally her marriage at age thirty-eight and early death less than a year later.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte, by Elizabeth Gaskell, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences-biographical, historical, and literary-to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. In 1855 Charlotte Bronte, pregnant and married less than a year, fell ill and died of tuberculosis-the same disease that had killed her sisters and brother. Two years after Charlotte's death, her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, herself a well-known novelist, completed work on The Life of Charlotte Bronte, a biography that was met with immediate acclaim by readers curious to discover more about the enigmatic author of Jane Eyre. Both a work of art and a well-documented interpretation of its subject, Gaskell's biography is an extraordinarily vividand sensitive account of Bronte's outer and inner lives: her shyness and strangeness; her intense appreciation of the Bible, poetry, music, and the theater; her love of her family; and her fears of loneliness. Meant to be a defense and vindication of a noble, true, and tender woman, the book paints Bronte as an unforgettable figure careening between depression and exaltation. It also portrays her suffering. In her personal life, Bronte knew deprivation and loss, while in her artistic life, despite her fame, she had been taunted as coarse and had none of the advantages that a man might take for granted. A powerful tribute from one writer to another, The Life of Charlotte Bronte remains one of the most evocative and perceptive biographies ever written. Anne Taranto was educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities and at Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. She has taught courses on the novel and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Georgetown University and is currently at work on a study of Charlotte Bront?'s relationship to the literary marketplace.