Volume I: 1829-1847: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Volume I: 1829-1847 (Letters of Charlotte Brontė) - Hardcover

Charlotte Bronte; Margaret Smith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198185979 ISBN 13: 9780198185970

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 1995

Synopsis

`Men don't seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication - they always seem to think us uncautious. I'm sure I don't think I have said anything rash - however you must burn it when read.' Despite the request, Charlotte Brontė's lifelong friend Ellen Nussey probably burnt very little of her correspondence, and in this edition, based as far as possible on original manuscripts, many confidential and outspoken letters are published in full for the first time.

The present volume includes letters from Charlotte's childhood (the first written to her father in September 1829), and takes the reader up to the publication and review of Jane Eyre (1847). Early editions depended largely on bowdlerized or inaccurate copies, and even the much improved Shakespeare Head edition of 1932 suffered from limited access to manuscripts, owing to the nefarious activities of T. J. Wise. Since 1932 many more manuscripts have become available, and the present edition includes new letters, previously unpublished passages censored by Ellen Nussey or Mrs Gaskell, and full annotation. As well as Charlotte's own letters, a handful of important letters by friends and family relating to her or illuminating her correspondence are included, along with extracts from the diaries of Emily and Anne Brontė, Ellen Nussey, and Charlotte's rejected suitor Henry Nussey. The full Introduction includes an illuminating account of the early publication history of the letters, and biographical material on the main correspondents. Of particular interest in the notes to this volume are the extensive quotations from early reviews of Jane Eyre.

About this title

Review

a monumental and scholarly work ... unquestionably the definitive edition, allowing us to read the unexpurgated version of Charlotte's letters for the first time, and will be compulsory reading for Brontė scholars and enthusiasts alike. (Daily Telegraph)

brilliant and scrupulous Notes (Observer)

This first volume of Charlotte's letters is an invaluable scholarly resource and a stirring story ... (Sunday Times)

For anyone interested in how life is transmuted into art, this volume will be a pleasure. (Financial Times)

The strength of this volume of letters, many published for the first time, is that it allows Charlotte to speak with her own voice. For anyone interested in how life is transmuted into art, this volume will be a pleasure. (Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times)

It is a work of painstaking scholarship: she has located new letters and redated and established accurate texts for old ones...Margaret Smith has made a magnificent job of disinterring Charlotte Bronte's own letters, and in doing so has inaugurated a new era in Bronte studies. (The Independent on Sunday)

a monumental and scholarly work. The redating of many letters is particularly important ... this is unquestionably the definitive edition, allowing us to read the unexpurgated version of Charlotte's letters for the first time, and will be compulsory reading for Bronte scholars and enthusiasts alike. (The Daily Telegraph)

Margaret Smith, an exemplary editor, provides all the biographical grounding you could want. There is hardly a reference she does not explain, hardly a fictional echo she does not pick up (The Guardian)

Readers must be grateful to Margaret Smith for the recovery of accurate texts - as accurate as they can be at this point in time, given their wanderings, dismemberments and mutilations ... The restoration of the texts themselves is a triumph of meticulous labour. (The Independent)

now, at last, we have this reliable text, painstakingly reassembled and scrupulously edited by Margaret Smith ... This first volume of Charlotte's letters is an invaluable scholarly resource and a stirring story, resonant with powerful feeling, in which a hidden imaginative life stubbornly forces its way through the thickets of domesticity into the light of day. I can hardly wait for the sequel. (The Sunday Times)

About the Author

Margaret Smith is a renowned Brontė scholar, textual editor of the Clarendon edition of Charlotte Brontė's novels (General editor, Ian Jack), and co-editor with ian Jack of the three volumes. For OUP she is the co-editor of the following works of Charlotte Brontė: Jane Eyre (1969, rev. 1975), and editor of Jane Eyre in the OENS series (1973, into WC in 1975); Shirley (1979, into WC in 1981); Villette (1984, into WC in 1990); The Professor (1987, into WC in 1991). Co-editor of Anne Brontė's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1992), and of Robert Browning's The Poetical Works (Vols 1&2, 1983, Vol. 4, 1991).

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0198185979
• ISBN 13: 9780198185970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 652