Charlotte Bronte

English writer (Thornton, April 21, 1816 – Haworth, March 31, 1855). Along with George Eliot, the most prominent Victorian writer, whose novel Jane Eyre is one of the most influential works of English literature.

Charlotte Brontë is the eldest of the 3 Brontë sisters, who were involved in literature. Charlotte was very good friends with writers such as: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray and G. H. Lewes, and she was a great opponent of Jane Austen.

Her central achievement is the novel Jane Eyre (1847), originally labeled "autobiography" in the subtitle, a kind of combination of realistic and romantic prose, with which she confirmed her attachment to the characters of materially and intellectually independent, but romance-hungry women.

The work is a successful combination of Gothic (Byronic hero, motifs of madness, suicide, "dark" doppelgangers, haunted houses) and a realistic novel with a didactic subtext (with a touch of satire), which is manifested in the heroine's adherence to the moral law, but also in the criticism of social practices related to gender, class, mental health and race. Since the novel is focused on the inner world of the protagonist - for those times an unconventionally independent and independent heroine - from whose perspective the personal conflict between love and moral duty, i.e. desire and social restrictions is evoked, Brontë is considered "the first historian of private consciousness" and in this sense forerunner of modernist literature.

She also wrote the first "regional" novel in English, Shirley (1849), which, in addition to the use of an omniscient narrator atypical for her, is characterized by a detailed analysis of Yorkshire society in the period of the industrial revolution, and she edited the second edition (1850) of the novel Hurricane Heights and Agnes Gray sisters Emily and Anne, revealing their real names in a biographical note.

Towards the end of the 20th and into the 21st her work became an important subject of the feminist revaluation of Victorian literature, and the characters of Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason became examples of the position of women and their voice in society in the 19th century. para.

Her novels were first published in Croatia in 1974: The Professor was translated by Anita Ljubić, Shirley Gordana Popović Vujičić, and Villette by Sonja Budak, while Jane Eyre was published that year in two translations - by Giga Gračan and Andrijana Hewitt and by Karl Budor.