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CHARLOTTE BRONTE

1816-1855

Charlotte's first novel The Professor was rejected by publishers. But the young author was not discouraged and produced Jane Eyre (1847). It was followed by Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). These three books made her famous.

In her novels Ch. Bronte combined scenes from her own life with the far richer and more romantic experiences which she imagined. She aimed to make her novels a realistic picture of society but she also added to her realism elements of passionate romanticism. The essential subject of her books is the soul of a woman, a governess or a teacher, limited by loneliness, poverty and social insignificance. Her heroines are generous, intelligent, modest and gentle, trying to suppress their deepest feelings. Ch.Bronte attacks greed and lack of culture of the bourgeoisie and sympathizes with the workers and peasants. She was convinced that society could be reformed by means of education.

Jane Eyre. It contains all the elements that make up Charlotte's conception of life. On the first pages of the book the reader meets Jane Eyre as a small girl at her aunt's house and later at the age of eight at Lowood Charity School. She is an orphan, a plain and pen­niless girl, but a proud rebel, who possesses her own feelings of right and wrong. The first part of the book is a moving rendering of Jane's childhood The narrative spans the life of Jane Eyre from childhood to her being a wife and mother. Within this period of approximately twenty years there is inevitably an insight into the intellectual and psycho­logical growth of the heroine. It is important to remember that the ideas which emerge through the narrative were considered to be radical, and indeed shocking, by her contemporary readership. For a child to rebel against an oppressive adult and to indulge in verbal confrontation, for example, was to the Victorian readership a courting disaster! Jane confronts her Aunt Reed with the latter's tyranny. She accuses her of bias and partiality, harshness and injustice. She confronts Mr.Brocklehurst, who adds religious hypocrisy to injus­tice and cruelty in his dealings with the children in his school. He simulates virtue to the outsiders but is guilty of cruelty, oppression and fraud in the running of Lowood. Jane survives the attempts to crush her individuality by these two characters. She survives by means of her strong natural instincts for what is right and the expression of her independent spirit, which first appears in the form of a passionate defence of her position. She is greatly helped in this by Helen Burns and Miss Temple. Through the lasting influ­ence of these characters Jane is able to cope with the moral struggle with which she is faced once she has left Lowood.

The other part of the book is one of the most romantic love stories in English literature. When Jane grows up she becomes the governess of Mr. Rochester's foster daughter. Mr.Rochester is a strong, noble, proud, manly and tragic figure. He is a victim of his class and therefore at war with it. He is much older than Jane. His life has been miserable. He has been wandering here and there seek­ing rest and dulling his intellect. Heart-weary and soul-withered Mr. Rochester meets Jane. He finds in her many of the good and bright qualities which he has sought for twenty years. He proposes to Jane. She is in love with her master and agrees to become his wife. The young woman does not know the truth: for years Mr. Rochester has kept a lunatic wife in his house in charge of a serv­ant. Nobody suspects her existence. She is not only used as a pawn in the materialistic game played by Rochester's father, but spends most of her adult life mad in the attic. On the eve of Jane's mar­riage the lunatic enters Jane's room and tears her bridal veil in half. Jane is terrified. In the church she learns that Mr. Rochester is married. Her confidence is destroyed. Her hopes are all dead. She leaves Thornfield, though she still loves Mr. Rochester.



Half-starved, worn-out and soaked to the skin Jane drops at the door of her cousin's house. There she gets to know that she is the heiress of some 20,000 pounds that her uncle has left her. Jane shares the money with her cousins. One of them, John Rivers, is going to India as a missionary and asks Jane to accompany him as his wife. Jane agrees to go with him, but not as his wife, because they do not love each other. J. Rivers insists on marriage. Just as Jane is on the point of yielding she seems to hear Mr

Thornfield and learns that the madwoman set the mansion house to the fire, jumped off the roof and killed herself. A burning beam blinded Mr. Rochester and crushed his hand. He is now quite broken down. Jane comes to him and becomes his right hand and the apple of his eyes. They marry and their union is happy.

Jane Eyre depicts a poor girl's rebellion against cruelty, injus­tice, the division of people into the poor and the rich, the inhuman educational system in English charity schools and her struggle for woman's emancipation. The author's wish to show that women are not inferior to men has led her a little astray - her heroine is too good to be true to life. Charlotte Bronte presents things in a realis­tic and satirical way. In Mr.Rochester's house Jane meets the coun­ty gentry - uncultured, calculating, ambitious, cold and vulgar. They are contrasted with Jane, a poor orphan. She is honest, intel­ligent, brave, strong-willed and clever.

The structure of the book is simple. Events follow one another in quick succession. There are a lot of emotional and thrilling epi­sodes in the novel. Charlotte Bronte has also a fine knowledge of the English language and she employs it masterfully.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894

R. L. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father was a civil engineer. The boy's health was poor, and later on he often spoke about it in his poems:

His ancestors were the builders of light-houses and wished him to continue their business. Stevenson studied law and engineering at the University of Edinburgh, but never practiced them, though he showed great talent as an engineer and in 1871 received the silver medal of the Royal Edinburgh Society for his scientific work on intermittent light for the light-houses. Since childhood he had dreamt of literary career. His life was a heroic struggle with a lung disease, and he spent much time abroad. Until 1879 he mainly lived in France. He met Mrs. Fanny Osborn from California, the USA. Later when he heard about her illness he emigrated to the USA to stay with her. In 1880 they married. His stepson Lloyd Osborn became the co-author of a few later books. When his lung diseas progressed Fanny took him to the Southern seas. They visit Hawaii, Tahiti, and travel around the Polynesian Islands. Stevenson's last years of life passed in Samoa where Stevenson built a house. He was loved by the natives of Samoa who called him the creator of tales. He loved the land and its oppressed people. When he died, he was carried to his grave by the natives who mourned for him as their friend and protector. A bronze tablet on his tomb bears the epitaph he wrote for himself:

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky_ Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

The charm of Stevenson's personality is reflected in his poems for children A Child's Garden of Verse (1885). These poems reveal a child's freshness, directness and naivety of thought. His other vol­umes of poetry are The Underwoods (1887), Ballads (1890) and Songs of Travels (1896).

Stevenson first won fame with the publication of a romance entitled Treasure Island (1881). It was immediately popular with the public. Treasure Island was followed by the historical novels The Black Arrow (1888), Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893). The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) shows the battle of good and evil in man's heart. Stevenson is also the author of The Master of Ballantrae (1889), The Wrong Box (1889) and a number of mystery stories. At his death he was working on Weir of Hermiston. This unfinished novel is considered to be the best of Stevenson's whole work.

Robert Louis Stevenson is generally referred to as a neo-roman- ticist. Neo-Romanticism was a trend in literature which came into being at the end of the XIX century. The writers of this literary trend scorned their contemporary bourgeois society and turned to the past or described exotic travels and adventures. The strong ro­mantic streak in everything Stevenson wrote was conditioned by his dislike of the vulgar philistinism and narrow-mindedness of the middle-class way of living and thinking. He was attracted to the romance of adventure and freedom, of risky undertakings in lonely seas and exotic countries. He idealized the strong and brave men who went down to these lands in ships. In his novels Stevenson told his readers about life full of novelty, about high passions and thrill­ing sensations and displayed his powers of concentrated character study. His style was suited to the purpose of his story. He was a gifted and original writer, sensitive to the niceties of expression, a lover of words for their colour and sound. Stevenson considered art superior to life for art could create a new and better reality. It is obvious that the writer was influenced and responded to the doc­trine of "art for art's sake", but he did not live up to this doctrine in his work.

Treasure Island. It is the first of Stevenson's romances of ad­venture. This novel belongs to the class of books which are at once exciting for boys and fascinating for adults. It makes its appeal to the reader by the romantic situations, fascinating events and the most exciting adventures of the characters. Treasure Island is a story of a search for buried treasure. The hero of the novel is Jim Hawkins. It is he who tells the reader about his adventures. At the Admiral Benbow Inn an old sailor leaves a chest with some papers. Among the papers there is the map of Treasure Island. From this very moment Jim's adventures begin. He and his friends, Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney set out for the island. They outfit a ship, but there are some dangerous men in the crew. To make the matters worse, Long John Silver and his gang are also after the treasure. At the end of the story Jim returns home from the island with the treasure.

OSCAR WILDE 1856-1900

O. Wilde was born in Dublin in the family of a famous Irish surgeon and a poetess. He received a very good education at Trinity College in Dublin and in Oxford University. At school he was a brilliant pupil and at the University he excelled in classics and poetry. In 1881 O. Wilde visited America where he lectured on art. He soon became famous as a poet, a novelist and a dramatist. In his works and personal life O. Wilde attempted to follow the principles of his theory of aestheticism.

In 1881 O. Wilde published his first collection of poetry Poems.

Many of his poems are fine lyrics and convey the peculiar atmos­phere and beauty of English scenery in simple and vivid words. The play of sounds and colours in them characterize the poetry of impres­sionism. Such are his poems "Impressions" and "Symphony in Yellow".

Impressions

The sea is flecked with bars of grey, The dull dead wind is out of tune, And like a withered leaf the moon Is blown across the stormy bay.

Etched clear upon the pallid sand Lies the black boat: a sailor boy Clambers aboard in careless joy With laughing face and gleaming hand.

And overhead the curlews cry. Where through the dusky upland grass The young brown-throated reapers pass, Like silhouettes against the sky.

Symphony in Yellow

An omnibus across the bridge Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

And, here and there, a passer-by Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges of yellow hay

Are moved against the shadowy wharf,

And, like a yellow silken scarf,

The thick fog hands along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade And flutter from the Temples elms, And at my feet the pale green Thames Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

Some poems, such as "E tenebris" and "Vita Nuova" are full of pessimism. But his poem "Ave Imperatrix" is a great contrast to the latter ones. Wilde tells that expansion of other lands by Britain doesn't bring a simple English girl happiness. She will never see her beloved who had been killed in the war. The children will never feel their father's love. The country is turning into a trading house where everything can be bought and sold, even intelligence and respect. The poet criticizes the rulers of the country.

Wilde's beautiful fairy-tales The Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared in 1888 and another volume of tales A House of Pomegran ates was produced inl891. Contrary to Wilde's own opinion that art should not mirror life his fairy-tales reflect its joys and sorrows. The reader feels a humanist behind every tale. O. Wilde's heroes are aesthetes who, just like the author, love beauty more than anything else. But having passed through much pain and suffering they change. The writer shows that suffering in ennobling. It makes people capa­ble of deep emotions and self-sacrifice. The secret of life is to be helpful and good to others. Sometimes it is impossible to alter any­thing because of people's cruelty, hypocrisy, selfishness and indif­ference. But there is always true friendship and love.

O.Wilde's fairy-tales were followed by his only novel The Pic ture of Dorian Gray (1891) and several essays in criticism under the title Intentions (1891).

O. Wilde won his fame as a dramatist. The most significant of his comedies are: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893); An Ideal Husband (1895); The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). His play Salome, la Sainte Courtisanne (1893) is written in French. O. Wilde's sparkling comedies of fashionable life still attract many theatre-goers. They reveal the selfishness, vanity and corruption of English higher society in a playful man­ner. The plays are notable for their brilliant dialogues, witty para­doxes and entertaining plots.

In 1895 he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for violat­ing the moral laws. In prison O. Wilde wrote two works The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis. The latter is a prose account of his state of mind while undergoing a jail sentence. The hero of the The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a young man who has killed his unfaithful beloved girl. The ballad tells of cruelty, injustice, cor­ruption and baseness.

After his release from prison he spent the last two years of his life wandering about Europe, went to France and he died in Paris under the name of Sebastian Melmont on November 30 because of meningitis caused by ear infection.

O. Wilde made use of a variety of themes in his literary works. He felt that the roots of all the evils of his contemporary society was social inequality.

The Picture of Dorian Gray. O. Wilde's prose fiction reveals the contradiction between his theory and his literary work. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his fairy-tales show that man's chief purpose in life cannot be seeking pleasure. To be good is more important than to be beautiful. Though O.Wilde in the preface to his novel declares that all art is quite useless, the novel itself proves the opposite.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a psychological study of the grad­ual degradation of an innocent and inexperienced man. It is cen­tered around problems of art and reality. The three principal char­acters - Dorian Gray, a young and brilliant nobleman, his friend, the painter Basil Hallward and the cynical Lord Henry - discuss the problems of art and reality, beauty and morality. To Basil beauty is a source of inspiration and creative work. His portrait of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece. On seeing the picture Dorian exclaims: "I shall grow old and horrible and dreadful. But the picture will re­main young. If it were only the other way! I would give my soul for that. Youth is the only thing worth having." Dorian's wish comes true. Years pass. He follows Lord Henry's philosophy of hedonism though his face remains young and beautiful. But the portrait chang­es. Dorian's picture is the reflection of his soul. He lives only for pleasure, he leads an immoral life. Under Lord Henry's influence he becomes a selfish and cruel dandy who commits terrible crimes. The portrait shows a cynical, aged and corrupted man. Dorian wants to get rid of the picture and stabs it. That is the last of his crimes. He falls down on the floor, with a knife in his heart, "withered, wrin­kled and loathsome of visage". But upon the wall is again hanging a splendid portrait in all its original beauty.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 1859-1930

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859 to an Irish Catholic family of engineers and artists. He was educat­ed at the Jesuit Stonyhurst Academy and at Feldkich College in Austria. Then he went to medical school at Edinburgh University, becoming a surgeon in 1881 and practicing medicine in Southsea, near Portsmouth, England. His writing career began as early as 1883. Doyle's best known works are, of course, the detective novels and short stories featuring the eccentric genius Sherlock Holmes. The first two novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890), aroused very little notice. In 1891 the Strand maga­zine started publishing the dozen brief tales later collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and Doyle's popularity grew rapidly. Thinking of writing historical novels, Doyle sent Holmes to his death in The Final Problem.

But Doyle's public refused to accept his verdict of Holmes's death as final and he was moved to write his most popular Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) which was followed by The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903).

During the Boer War Doyle had volunteered to work as an un­paid physician in South Africa. His brave and effective service re­sulted in his being knighted in 1902. He also continued to write Holmes stories, which are collected in His Last Bow (1917) and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

The main subject of the historical novel Micah Clarce is the Monmouth rebellion. In this book we have an imaginative record of the whole pitiful affair: the landing of Monmouth at Lyme Regis, the devotion of the western peasants to his cause, the battle of Sedgemoor and his betrayal of his followers, the awful vengeance of Jeffreys, and the execution of Monmouth himself after his abject interview with James II.

Conan Doyle was the author of several other fine historical nov­els. Two of them, Sir Nigel and its sequel, The White Company, are romances of- medieval life and adventure, and The Refugees is a story of the Huguenots in France at the time of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Doyle died in 1930 in Windlesham on the English south coast.


Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1414


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