The written word has the power to generate ideas, inspire revolutions, and change the way we view ourselves and our place in history.

This series from the University of Auckland looks at the life history of influential authors, their style and beliefs, and the works they created.

Tuesday 23 August

Charlotte Bronte and Her Siblings, 200 Years On

Presented by Joanne Wilkes
BA, D.Phil 

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë. Her first published novel, Jane Eyre, was a literary sensation back in 1847, and remains one of most celebrated and most often filmed texts from the nineteenth century. This seminar will discuss Jane Eyre and its fame, but will also introduce its fascinating but lesser-known successors, Shirley, The Professor, and Villette.  In addition, it will set Charlotte Brontë’s work in the context of that of her younger siblings, Branwell, Emily and Anne. As children, the four wrote fantasy stories together, and the other two girls also became novelists. Emily’s Wuthering Heights is familiar; less so are Anne’s novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Both Charlotte and Anne’s fiction explore, but in quite different ways, the opportunities and obstacles confronted by women of their era.

About the presenter

Professor Joanne Wilkes was educated at Sydney and Oxford universities, and has worked at the University of Auckland since 1987. Her teaching and research concentrate on nineteenth-century literature. She has run for some years a graduate course on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, while her publications include Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot (Ashgate, 2010).

For more information, and to register, click here.