Selected Letters

Full of acute observations, pithy character sketches, and passionate convictions, the letters of Charlotte Brontë are our most direct source of information about the lives of the Brontës and our closest approach to the author of Jane Eyre . In them Charlotte writes of life at Haworth Parsonage, her experiences at a Belgian school, and her intense feelings for the Belgian schoolteacher, M. Heger. She endures the agony of the death of her siblings, and enjoys the success as a writer that brings her into contact with the London literary scene. Vivid and intimate, her letters give fresh insight into the novels, and into the development of her distinct literary style. The only available edition, this selection is derived from Margaret Smith's three-volume edition of Brontë's complete letters. In addition to Smith's Editor's Preface, the edition includes a critical introduction by Janet Gezari, who looks at the relationship between Brontë's letters and her fiction and how the letters add to the debate about her literary persona and the split between her public and her private life.

Margaret Smith is Vice-President of the Bront+½ Society and editor of the complete three-volume edition of the Letters. She is co-author, with Christine Alexander, of The Oxford Companion to the Brontes. Janet Gezari is the author of Charlotte Bronte and Defensive Conduct: the Author and the Body at Risk (1992) and Last Things: Emily Bronte's Poems (OUP, 2007). She has also written the introduction to the new edition of Bront+½'s Shirley for OWC.