EGL 304 - Jr. Seminar (Fall): The Brontë Sisters

Course Units: 1

(Fall; Lewin) Three authors in one family - sisters, survivors, and autodidacts - Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell are the names under which they publish. Currer, or Charlotte, outlives the others, if only by a few years, enabling her to almost double her sisters’ combined output and become the family’s aesthetic arbiter and literary executor. Upon her untimely death (at age 39), her contemporary author, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, writes a biography memorializing, lionizing, and some suggest mythologizing the family. Due to time constraints I have selected only works of first-person fiction (though Emily also published poems), excluding Charlotte’s Shirley and her posthumously published The Professor. You may wish to consider these or other contemporary works either for your contextual presentations or in your final projects. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level and two 200-level English courses. CC: HUL, HUM, WAC