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1 知识内容
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2 作业
内容
知识点 1 Elizabeth Gaskell
知识点 2 Charlotte Bronte
知识点 3 Emily Bronte
知识点 4 George Eliot
Module 7-unit 2 Female Novelists in the Victorian Age PPT 图片来源
1. Elizabeth Gaskell 1.
http://inmygoodbooks.wordpress.com
2. Mary Barton
http://emusic.com
3. The Life of Charlotte Bronte
http://janegs.blogspot.com
4. Charlotte Bronte 1.
http://wpclipart.com
5. Jane Eyre 1
http://bookschina.com
6. Shirley
http://hjenglish.com
7. Jane Eyre 2
http://blog.163.com
8. Emily Bronte
http://Mlquotes.com
9. Wuthering Heights
http://www.ebay.com.hk
10. George Eliot 1.
http://www.zaibb.com
11. George Eliot 2.
http://paper.wenweipo.com
12. George Eliot 3.
http://www.amazon.com
13. Middlemarch 1.
http://www.amazon.com
14. Middlemarch 2
讲义
Four Female Novelists in the Victorian Age
I. Elizabeth Gaskell
II. Charlotte Bronte
III. Emily Bronte
IV. George Eliot
I. Elizabeth Gaskell
She was an English novelist, known for her thorough research, compassion toward her subjects, and skillful narrative style.
She was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810. Her father and her husband were both clergymen. For many years she lived in the big industrial center of Manchester and the couple made a study of the conditions of the workers there, which gave her material for her works.
Her works mainly include:
Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life
Cranford
Ruth
North and South
The Life of Charlotte Bronte
Mary Barton deals with the miserable living conditions of the industrial workers in Manchester and with their struggle with the capitalists. It gives a truthful picture of the struggle between capital and labor in that period of sharp social conflict and gives a sympathetic version of the Chartist Movement and of the great miseries of the workers in big industrial centers in England in the middle decades of the 19th century.
The Life of Charlotte Bronte is the biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte. It is one of the better known literary biographies in England .
II. Charlotte Bronte
Family of British novelists and poets include Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte.
They were the daughters of a poor country clergyman at Haworth, Yorkshire, in northern England . Charlotte was born in 1816. She studied in a charity school with her four sisters where they were cruelly treated, and two of the sisters died there.
At the age of 19 she worked as a school-teacher and later as a governess. In 1846 a volume of poetry written by Charlotte, Emily and Anne was published under their pseudonyms. Charlotte did not achieve success in writing until the publication of her novel Jane Eyre in 1847.
In 1854 she married her father's curate A. B. Nicholas and she died the next year. Before her death, she had lost her two beloved sisters, Emily and Anne.
In her three principal novels, Jane Eyre , Shirley and Villette , Charlotte Bronte showed herself a critical realist who attacks the greed, petty tyranny and lack of culture among the upper classes and sympathizes with the sufferings of the workers and of poor people in general. The chief distinctive feature of her novels is the creation of courageous, upright figures.
Jane Eyre is by far the best known of Charlotte Bronte's novels. The story evolves around the heroine, a poor orphan girl, who was badly treated by her aunt, the woman who brought her up. Jane reacted strongly against ill-treatment of her aunt and the teachers in the charity school. And her love with Mr. Rochester never fails to attract readers.
The novel contains not only the author's criticism of bourgeois attitude toward marriage and love, but also her ruthless exposure of inhuman misery in charity schools of her day which is run in the name of philanthropy.
The following is the excerpt of Jane Eyre , which shows the common girl—Jane's unrelenting pursuit of freedom and equality.
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! —I have as much soul as you, —and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; —it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal, —as we are!
难道就因为我一贫如洗、默默无闻、长相平庸、个子瘦小，就没有灵魂，没有心肠了？ —— 你不是想错了吗？ —— 我的心灵跟你一样丰富，我的心胸跟你一样充实！要是上帝赐予我一点姿色和充足的财富，我会使你同我现在一样难分难舍，我不是根据习俗、常规，甚至也不是血肉之躯同你说话，而是我的灵魂同你的灵魂在对话，就仿佛我们两人穿过坟墓，站在上帝脚下，彼此平等 —— 本来就如此！
Charlotte Bronte was greatly influenced by Thackeray. So she dedicated Jane Eyre to him and in the preface to that novel she expressed her indebtedness to him.
III. Emily Bronte
Emily Bronte, the younger sister of Charlotte , was born in 1818. She shared the miserable life of the whole Bronte family but differed from her elder sister in having a more passionate and rebellious character. She had a short life, only 30 years. But her masterpiece Wuthering Heights has been highly acclaimed.
Wuthering Heights , published in 1847, is a romance about Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff . It gives a realistic story of the relations between the oppressed and the oppressor and of the revenge that results from their relations. Wuthering Heights , which contains Gothic colors, is a powerful novel of critical realism and it gives a faithful record of human relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed in Victorian England.
IV. George Eliot
George Eliot (1819-1880), an English novelist, in the first rank of 19th-century English writers. Her fame was international, and her work greatly influenced the development of French naturalism.
George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was born in 1819, into an estate agent's family in Warwickshire , England .
She was forced to drop school at the age of 16 on account of her mother's death and her sister's marriage, and yet she continued her study at home and managed to learn three foreign languages and music all by herself.
The moving of her family to Coventry gradually led to the shift in her belief.
Later she fell in love with a married man, George Henry Lewes. And this brought her into collision with her family and social conventions.
Her job as a distinguished essayist and editor for Westminster Review brought her into contact with many of the famous men of the time.
Under their influence and encouragement she started her literary career at the age of 39. Being a woman of intelligence and versatility, she quickly found herself ranking high among the great writers.
Her major works include
Adam Bede
Silas Marner
The Mill on the Floss
Felix Holt, the Radical
Middlemarch
Adam Bede is a powerful novel and a finely written one, with its exaltation of simple people, its psychological analysis of the characters, and its truthful pictures of village life.
Middlemarch , is one of George Eliot's last novels and a work of maturity. It unfolds a panoramic view of the life of many persons of different types in a provincial town in the Midlands . Despite the loose construction, Middlemarch is George Eliot's great novel because characters of different types are vividly portrayed and many social problems are discussed through the characterization.
Writing at the later half of the 19th century and closely following the critical realist writers, George Eliot was working at something new. By joining the worlds of inward propensity and outward circumstances and showing them both operating in the lives of her characters, she initiates a new type of realism and sets into motion a variety of development, leading in the direction of both the naturalistic and psychological novel. She is deeply concerned with the depiction of the people and life of her time; moreover, her mind is always active, instinctively analyzing and generalizing to discover the fundamental truth about human life.
As a woman of exceptional intelligence and life experience, George Eliot shows a particular concern for the destiny of women, especially those with great intelligence, potential and social aspirations, such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss , and Dorothea in Middlemarch . In her mind, the pathetic tragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education and limited social life determine that they must depend on men for sustenance and realization of their goals, and they have only to fulfill the domestic duties expected of them by the society. Their opportunities of success are not even increased by wealth. It is just as Daniel Deronda's actress mother says to her son: “Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster…I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it…You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl”.
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扩展学习
Read Gaskell's novel Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life and makes a report in 2 thousand words.
Appreciate the works of Bronte Sisters.
