Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings

Book excerpt: Composed of serialized works, poems, short tales, and novellas, Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia merit serious scholarly attention as revelatory works in and of themselves as well as for what they tell us about the development of Brontë as a writer. This timely collection attends to both critical strands, positioning Brontë as an author whose career encompassed the Romantic and Victorian eras and delving into the developing nineteenth century's literary concerns as well as the growth of the writer's mind. As the contributors show, Brontë's authorship took shape among the pages of her juvenilia, as figures from Brontë's childhood experience of the world such as Wellington and Napoleon transmuted to her fictional pages, while her siblings' works and worlds both overlapped with and extended beyond her own.