Yet Caroline Helstone’s ethereal femininity and infantilization mirrors Anne Brontë’s reputation as the ‘obedient’ sibling, as well as the views expressed in her semi-autobiographical novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).Ĭreative Commons Attribution 4. This juvenilia piece explores themes of waning sibling connections, death and heartbreak – issues which tormented Branwell and Charlotte throughout his prolonged final illness.

Mere weeks before Charlotte began volume 1 of Shirley, Branwell was determined to return to a heroine created in his childhood, also named “Caroline (1836)”. In despair, as a form of catharsis, she turned to her writing and this essay will focus on how protagonist Caroline Helstone became an elegy for both Branwell and Anne Brontë. Bront resumed writing, but then her only remaining sibling, her sister Anne, became ill and died in May 1849. Her brother Branwell died in September 1848, and her sister Emily fell ill and died in December. Charlotte was the last sibling standing, having lost all her co-authors in the space of nine months. While Charlotte Bront was writing Shirley three of her siblings died. However, by the summer of 1849, their familial collaboration was at an end. Throughout adulthood, each Brontë continuously returned to these stories, oftentimes due to nostalgia and occasionally for creative reinvention.

It was Bronts second published novel after Jane Eyre (originally. In their adolescent years, the Brontës famously forged fictional kingdoms together, known collectively as “The Glass Town Saga”. Shirley is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Bront. During the writing of Shirley, Bront experienced a series of personal tragedies that. This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley as a literary endeavour to recreate the sibling dynamic of the Brontës’ childhoods, and the psychological effect of being the ‘surviving’ sibling of a formally collaborative unit. Bront went on to publish two more novels, Shirley (1849) and Villette.

Charlotte bronte 1849