Età Vittoriana Riassunto, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Età Vittoriana Riassunto e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE (1837-1901) Queen Victoria Queen Victoria came to the throne during a difficult political and economic situation. The middle- class had been partly satisfied by the Reform Bill of 1832, but the working class still endured very poor conditions, aggravated by crises in industry and agriculture. The largest organized workers movement was that one of the CHARTIST, so called because they asked for a charter of social reforms. In 1838, they drew up a People’s charter asking for the extension of the right to vote to the working class. It was only in 1837 that a second Reform bill was passed: it gave town workers the right but excluded miners and agriculture workers. Three year later, in 1851, the Great International Exibition of London, opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, displayed the wonders of industry and science, revealing Britain as the world is leading political and economic power. Joseph Paxton held the great exhibition in Crystal Palace and it became a symbol of Victorian age. It was during Victorian’s reign that Britain’s modern parties were born: - The Conservatives grew out of the old Tories; - The Liberals out of the Whigs. The growth in political importance of the working class was marked by the foundation of the Labour party in 1900. Thanks to it the third Reform Bill, representatives of the workers could sit in Parliament. In addition, during this period, relations with Ireland had always been difficult and they worsened under Victoria’s reign because of potato blight (patata batterica). For this reason irish people moved to US and England because their diet was based on potato. A movement for Irish independence began. During Victorian age, British Empire expanded. It grew out of two complementary processes: the impulse to consolidate overseas markets and the super plus d of population at home. The British government also took over from the East India Company and ruled over India. In 1876 Queen Victoria became Empress of India (India , Bangladesh, Pakistan). Britain controlled Africa and The Cape of Good Hope, which relationship between Dutch colonists and the British were never good. The Boer War was won by Britain, which gained control over the provinces of Orange and Transvaal, rich in gold and diamonds. The Victorian Compromise The term Victorian has acquired a negative meaning in our century, suggesting an idea of prudery, extreme propriety, often hypocritical, in behaviour or speech and in sexual matters. Though there is some truth in this, it does not sum up the period adequately. The triumph of industry coincided with the steam engine, the fiery devil. Steamboats, invented in 1824, covered all the country with railroads and they linked America with Britain. Many inventions were in this period: thanks to Morse the telegraph and a lot of research about electricity (Volta, Ampère, Faraday). Gas lighting was introduced in London in 1816. The invention of the postage stamp was fundamental for the development of British postal system. Despite the prosperity brought about by trade and new technology, the poor endured terrible conditions. The new poor Law of 1834, founded on Unitarian principles, was far from a solution to the problem: the pooe were amassed in workhouses in appalling conditions, as denounced in Oliver Twist. In the large cities, urban slums (baraccopoli) became synonymous with the Industrial Revolution. The filth (sporcizia), misery and moral degradation of the workers’s dwellings are testified by different sources such as contemporary newspaper, report, essays, novels, pictures and engravings/incisioni. Other laws are The mines act, forbidding the employment of women and children in mines; the Emancipation of religious Sects, which allowed Catholics to hold government jobs and to enter the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Trade Union Act, which legalised the activities of the unions of workers. The trade unions grew steadily and came to play an important role in the determination of internal policy. Women acquired importance and they went to the college, to become nurse, doctors and journalist. The first petition to Parliament asking for women’s suffrage was in 1840, but they voted in 1918. Also during Victorian age, such writers denounced critical conditions about children working and worker’s struggle. Two main phases It is important to distinguish two main phases in Victorian literature: - Early Victorian: poets like Alfred Tennyson or Dickens seem to be critical of their age but still to identify with it and with their readers. - Late Victorian: the sense of isolation of the writer is clear and results in shocking forms of denunciation, such as the novels by George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, or in exoticism in Oscar Wilde. This last phase looks ahead to the 20th century. The Victorian Age is the first to be characterised by that typically modern phenomenon literary movements. Previously, artists rarely formed deliberate groups, but just happened to move in the same circles, for example the Elizabethan court poets or the Augustan writers. Apart from various forms of the late Romanticism, the most important literary movements developed at the end of the Victorian Age, when continental influence became stronger: Realism and Naturalism prescribed a detailed imitation of life even in its less pleasant aspects life should not be idealised, and the artist should be objective, often describing urban life in preference to the country. The artist was supposed to be something of a social historian and philosopher too: Aestheticism and Decadentism, two related movements on which French influence was particularly strong, claimed that the artist had no moral obligations, and that should not take up the issues on the time. ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865) Elizabeth Gaskell was a novelist and biographer. Her first novel, one of her best, Mary Barton (1858), is set in Manchester in the “hungry forties”, so called because of the living conditions of the working classes. Her second great novel, Cranford (1851-53), is about a small village community and is reminiscent of Jane Austen’s light and finely humorous writing. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, at the suggestion of her husband - in order to take her mind off of her infant son William's death from scarlet fever in 1845. The plot is based on the real-life murder of a progressive mill owner in 1831. Gaskell relied on inspiration from previously published industrial fiction, her keen observations of Manchester life, and her vivid imagination. The publishing house Chapman and Hall bought the manuscript for a hundred pounds and published the novel, then called "A Tale of Manchester Life", on October 25th, 1848 under Gaskell's pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. Her true identity came out by 1849. Originally, Gaskell planned to title the novel John Barton, after the man she believed to be the hero of the story. Gaskell's sympathetic depiction of Manchester factory workers garnered much critical attention from the higher circles of English society. Charles Dickens was impressed with her work and asked Gaskell to contribute to his periodical, Household Words. While critics and literati praised Gaskell's work, public reactions varied greatly, depending on the individual reader's political and social lyrical, descriptive and dramatic effects. The main strength of Dickens’s style is his humour, through which he makes the strong points of his novels unforgettable, and manages to wide his weakness. He was a master of all tricks of the comic style: farcical episodes, caricature of physical or mental defects, irony, humorous dialogue, dialect or slang effects. In his lifetime Dickens was extraordinary popular and he still remains the best-known English novelist. He influenced many of his contemporaries such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mark Twain. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950) Shaw was born in Dublin of English parents. After leaving school at the age of 14 and working in as estate agent’s office for 5 years, he went to live in London, with her mother who went there to improve her prospects as a music teacher. Shaw began his career as an unsuccessful novelist, but he was also a good theatre and literary reviewer, and a musical critic. When Shaw did finally turn to playwriting, his theory of the theatre was already formed by years of work as a theatre critic and by his study of the plays of the Norvegian Henrik Ibsen, whose works examine the tragic lives of men and women limited by social conventions. Shaw admired Ibsen for having been the first to introduce real debates and discussions into his plays, seeing him as a realist reformer of middle- class convention and hypocrisy. Mrs Warren’s Profession (1898), is included in the collection Plays Unpleasant, so called because their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts. In Mrs Warren’s profession, Shaw debates the problem of prostitution, confronting his audiences with a shocking dilemma: either prostitution is a job- and so women like Mrs warren should not be excluded from society-or it is a moral and social evil, and its causes (poverty and ignorance) must be corrected, without laying all the blame on the women who practise it. Mrs Warren’s profession was banned from the public stage. It was finally performed in 1902 in a private theatre; event he critics’ reaction was in Shaw’s words “a hysterical tumult of protest”. This, in a way, was what Shaw really wanted: to shock his audiences, but also to make them re-think accepted values. Plays Unpleasant was followed by Plays Pleasant: the two were later published together in 1898. The plays pleasant were less shocking but equally clear in pointing out the main problems of modern life. Shaw’s subsequent plays, collectively known as Three plays for Puritans, begin to explore the relation between history and the individual. Man and Superman (1903) was first performed at the Royal Court, London. It is one of Shaw’s most popular plays, and also one of the most important for an understanding of Shaw’s thought, because it presents his fullest statement of the philosophy of the Life Force. The central episode of the play is the Don Juan in hell interlude. The centrality if the Don Juan episode is clear from this consideration: in a play where Shaw sets out to prove that the Life Force runs through woman and that she is stronger that man, his choice of Don Juan as the spokesman for his theory is perfect to turn traditional commonplaces upside down (even Don Juan flatters himself with the idea of conquering a woman, he is in fact conquered by her). In his later plays, Shaw’s satire was tempered by a tolerant and sympathetic view of humanity, and his bitter irony partly turns into humour. This is clearly visible in some of his best-loved plays such as Major Barbara and Pygmalion. Major Barbara (1905) is a dramatic comedy, whose central issue is poverty. First performed at the Royal Court, London. Shaw’s intention to strike the audience is clear from the title: a woman who is a major. The problem of manipulation of the individual is at the centre of Pygamalion (1913), possibly Shaw’s most popular play, which has been made into a film several times. It is about a wealthy and eccentric professor of phonetic, henry Higgins, who makes a bet with a colleague oh his, Colonel Pickering, that in a few months he can turn an uneducated London flower-seller. In 1925 Shaw won the Nobel prize for literature. With Shaw, the theatre is a play of ideas, an animated prose for the discussion of current political, philosophical and social topics. All his great plays are essentially debates, people exchanging ideas and point of view, and the action follows the interplay of ideas created by bringing characters together on the stage. Action in subordinate to ideas. R.L STEVENSON (1850-1894) Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. He went to Edinburgh University to study engineering and then law. Both professions were his family’s choice; he always preferred literature and by 1875 had already decided to become a professional writer. In 1873, he went to French Riviera to recover from some respiratory illness and during one of his many trips to France he met his future wife, Frances Osbourne, an American divorcee. The years in France produced An Inland Voyage, describing a canoe tour in Belgium and France. His first full-length adventure novel, Treasure Island, a pirate story, brought him immediate fame. The well-known tale of the map and the hidden treasure is today a children’s classic, and has been filmed many times. It has a beautifully constructed plot and tells an exciting story through an extremely involving first-person narrative. Success increased with the publication of The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a short novel where he follows the example of the American Edgar Allan Poe, with his tales of terror. This is a fascinating treatment of the “double personality” theme, in which the reader is left to decide whether man is innately good or bad, and whether man’s civilisation is simply a historical accident or the result of good really being stronger that bad in man. The strange case came out in 1886. It has become so popular as to be a modern myth. The reason for its appeal are not to be found in the variety of incidents, the psychology of the characters, the evocative description of setting, but rather in the dramatic conflict it presents: man embodies good and evil—> these two folrces may be separated and left to fight each other, but the ultimate result may be the destruction of the personality they originally made up. Plot: The story is quite simple. Dr Jekyll, a highly reputed scientist who leads a quiet and sober life, is obsessed with the idea that his evil tendencies can be separated from his good side, giving birth to two beings: a good one and a bad one. Discovering a drug that works this change, he takes it and find it turns him into a new person, physically deformed and of an evil nature. This ugly man who commits all sorts of crimes, is called Mr Hyde. When Jekyll wants to return to his usual self, all he has to do is to take the drug again. However, he fears that for some reason he might remain trapped within the body of Hyde. So, Jekyll gives instructions for his house and servants to be at Hyde’s disposal, opens a bank account in Hyde’s name. This particularly worries Mr Utterson, his friend, who wants to know much about Mr Hyde. With time, Hyde’s evil nature grows, to the point that he commits murder and is ready to do more. Jekyll is frightened and he would like to rid himself, but he finds that he has lost control over him: it is Hyde, in fact, who takes over Jekyll’s body without needing to drug anymore. Seeing he has no way out of his situation, Jekyll closes himself in his laboratory and commits suicide, leaving a long note in which he explains his case and his body is found by Mr Utterson. There are three narrators: 1. The third person narrator who tells most of the story and closely follows Mr Utterson’s movements, and who is not omniscient; 2. Dr Lanyon, an old friend of Jekyll, who having seen Jekyll turn into Hyde, writes down his own version of the story (his narrative takes up the last but one chapter; 3. Dr Jekyll himself, whose narrative and final confession takes up the last chapter of the book, in the form of a letter; ironically, not even Jekyll is an all-known narrator, since he ignores much of what has gone on regarding the other characters of the story. This novel is one of the great thrillers of world literature. As in traditional thrillers, the various threads that make up the pattern of the story are pulled together at the end of the book by one of the characters- in this case two (Dr Lanyon and Dr Jekyll), for a final explanation of the mystery. Other elements of the crime story are: its title “case” points to police case as well as medical case; the setting, a foggy London of deserted streets; the scattered clues that may lead to the solution of the story. Stevenson’s book posed alarming questions and the answers were not very clear, but the doubt was enough to shake the foundations of the Victorian edifice. Was Jekyll and thus man’s evil side really stronger that the good side? Was man’s goodness only the result of society’s impositions or of stern self-discipline, without which man was a beast? Moreover, was it right to tamper with human nature to try to improve it, to separate good from evil, or was this not dangerous? BRAM STOKER (1847-1912) Though only a minor writer, the Irish born Bram Stoker gave birth to one of the lasting modern myth- not just in literature but also in theatre, cinema, and comic books. Bram Stoker was born in Dublin. He began writing as a drama critic for the Dublin Mail and in 1878 became the acting manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre. In 1875 he published his first horror story and in 1890 began research on a novel, The Un-dead, later to become Dracula. This, his most famous work, came out in 1897. The story of Dracula and its main features are well known: Transylvanian castles, supernatural transformations, vampire legends and so on. Count Dracula lives his castle in Transylvania. He never appears in daylight, sleep in a coffin, and is endowed with superhuman powers. Dracula buys a mansion in London and goes there. After his arrival, strange and horrible things begin to happen in England. A group of people finally succeeds in linking the mysterious events with the presence in England of some horrible creature, and unites to fight the evil forces. They go together to Transylvania after Dracula, who in the meantime feeling in danger has gone back to his castle. Once in Transylvania the party finds the coffin where Dracula lies and ritually kills him by driving a wooden stake into his heart: the vampire crumbles into dust at once. On a first level, Dracula reads like a horror story exploiting exotic Transylvania and the popularity of stories about mysterious creatures of the night. At a deeper level, however, Dracula may be read as a metaphor of the cracks in imperial British Victorian society. The fear of invasion by foreign monsters was really the fear of atavism, or reversion to a primitive or sub-human state in which instincts would come-out. Dracula, as Mr Hyde, is a projection of the Victorian Age’s fear of its secret and less clear aspects, the ones that had been carefully removed, but only at an official level, by the Victorian compromise. Dracula draws heavily on Gothic tales of horror for its sceneries. ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-1892) The story ha analogues with folk and fairy tales of a person whose life is strictly dependent on a magic object. But, Wilde also managed to put it in the fullest literary statement of his aesthetic doctrine: for Dorian the pursuit of pleasure and beauty was the purpose of life, and Life itself was the first, the greatest of the arts. Like Wilde, his creator, Dorian states that the senses are the elements of a new spirituality based on the cult of beauty transforming every material experience into an aesthetic experience. The same philosophy is stated in the PREFACE to Dorian Gray, which states that art must have no moral aim and is to be used to celebrate beauty and the sensorial pleasures, and contains some of Wilde’s most famous and quoted statements such as “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book”, or the celebrated and rather snobbish ending “all art is quite useless”. The Picture of Dorian Gray also contained an element of mystery that is essential to its success: the novel in fact was commissioned together with one of the Sherlock Holmes stories by an American publisher who wanted two mystery tales for his magazines. The end of the novel is in fact in line with classic horror and crime stories, particularly Stevenson’s The strange case of doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with which Dorian Gray has many points in common. If read at face value, the novel would seem to have no moral basis, Dorian Gray leads the kind of hedonistic life that disregards moral considerations and even ordinary human feelings- his dedication to pleasure causes the death of three people. However, the ending of the story is intensely moral and seems to suggest that there is a price to be paid for a life of pleasure. (Decadent art: it was surely a reaction against the bourgeois model. The decadent artist detests the values and the hypocrisy of the middle classes, what in England came to be known as Victorian compromise. He finds the central importance of money and business in modern society and cannot stand the cheapness and vulgarity of mass production. This, however, does not make him politically or socially concerned for the common man; on the contrary, he aristocratically keeps away from the mass of people and tries ti live a life of refined sensations instead). From 189 to 1895 Wilde embarked on a highly successful career as a writer of light comedies. The greatest of all them was The importance of being Ernest. Staged in 1895 was immediate hit. It is one of four comedies composed by him and he described it as a butterfly for butterflies to indicate his wish that it should be lightened than air as well as flashy and beautifully varied. The play had an extreme success may be due to the fact that it transforms life ‘unpleasant realities into enjoyable vitticism. It creates a world where missing babies and false identities can be funny and hurt no one, a world without moral because there is not necessity of moral but only beauty and wit. The story is about Jack Worthing, a rich and refined young man who lives in the country. When he went to London, he decided to call himself Ernest. He is in love with Gwendolen, his friend Algernon’s cousin. He proposes to her and she accepts. The lady mother Lady Bracknell is happy in a first time, until she knows that Jack does not know who are his parents. In the second act, Algernon arrives and introduces himself as Ernest. He met Cecily and they fell in love. So the two women are engaged to a man called Ernest. This causes a lot of misunderstandings and tension between the two. So, Jack confesses he has no brother and there is no Ernest, finally the two couples reconciled. At this point, Lady Bracknell recognises miss Prism, Cecily’s governess. Miss prism confesses that she had put the baby in a handbag in Victoria station. On hearing it, Jack leaves the room and he comes back with the bag in which he had been found as a baby. The woman is sure about the fact he is the baby that she has lost. So Jack is her nephew and Algernon is his brother and the original name was Ernest. There is in the Jack ‘words a pun ‘I’ve realised for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Ernest’ because he can marry Gwendolen, lady Bracknell’s nephew, but also earnest, in a sense honest. After this he spent much time in prison, accused of homosexuality with Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensbury. His period in his prison gave him the inspiration for two great works with a new way of life, The ballad of reading goal and De profundis. He left prison in 1897 and he was a broken and aged man. He went to France living a miserable existence as a banckrupt and social exile. He was supported economically by his friend and then, he died alone in a small hotel. ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) He was born in a rich and cultured family. He was educated at home; his father had 6000 books in the library, so he was a voracious reader. It was the reason why in his works there were contents from the remotest corners of history. Apart writing, he liked music, travelling ( he was in Russia and Italy). With his love of the exotic and the picturesque he was a typical upper-class Victorian, sharing the values of his age. He only broke social convention once, causing a great stir with his marriage. He met his future wife, Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid woman, who was dominated by a tyrannical father, in 1845. The courtship was conducted partly by letter. Finally they lived for 15 years in Italy and the marriage seems to have been happy on the whole, and the Italian climate and way of life was congenial to them. When his wife died, he was in crisis. This crisis can be found on his works, a collection of poems THE RING AND THE BOOK, a long poem whose subject is a 17th century trail that had taken place in Italy and had affinities with Browning’s own situation. After he returned to England with his son Pen, becoming a great poet and a public figure. From his first works PAULINE, PARACELSUS, SORDELLO, it was clear that Browning’s poetry was original. Running counter to the typical romantic modes of self-expression in first person lyrics, in his poems ‘the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet himself’. This actor is a single character faced with an ethical problem; the language is colloquial and the rhythm as abrupt as those of real live speech. Rhyme and alliteration are used. Browning is the acknowledge master of dramatic monologue: - It is constructed by first person speaker, not the poet but a historical figure( a poet, artist, saint, failed lover, charlatan). - Contents are set in a precis historical and geographical background. - There is a listener who usually says little but its presence is important; the tone and language are consistent with the speaker with psychology and cultural level. - The language is colloquial and spontaneous with contracted forms, pauses, repetitions, abrupt changes of tone or subject. The use of irregular syntax, punctuation and rhythm. All these characteristic can be found in the work ‘MY LAST DUCHESS’, set in Ferrara ( the poem is set in Renaissance Ferrara, ruled by the House of Este). The use of dramatic monologue is really a study of personality. It establishes three distinct poles of reference in a work: the reader, the speaker and the poet himself. One natural consequence is that Browning characters’ speak, the poems reproduce live speech rather than carefully finished formal structures. They digress, jump from an idea to another like Donne’s characters. Browning’s characters speak their minds, revealing their personalities and in this sense he had a great influence on modern literature. His use of point of view anticipates its manipulation in the modern novel. Careful reconstruction of the way the human mind works and formulates motives for often unjustifiable actions. Browning’s central perception is that people are driven by ideals which are compromised. He then shows how they try to hide the knowledge of their personal failure, not only from other people but from themselves. His characters knowledge that they might have been better than they are, is analysed with subtle and merciless insight. Many of his creations are archetypal studies of human weakness. For example MEN AND WOMEN contains characters experiencing the moral and religious doubt that is so typical of the Victorian age. He was influenced by Carlyle and Goethe and developed an idealistic conception of life in which evil was not-being, inaction, while value was to be found in a continues striving towards good. Today, his message appears more like a blend of traditional Christianity and a romanticism tinged with common sense. His originality was in technique. His unconventional use of language, syntax and metre is a multiplicity of selves. E. LEAR (1812-1888) The British poet and painter known for his absurd wit, Edward Lear was born on May 12, 1812 and began his career as an artist at age 15. His father, a stockbroker of Danish origins, was sent to debtor’s prison when Lear was thirteen and the young Lear was forced to earn a living. Lear quickly gained recognition for his work and in 1832 was hired by the London Zoological Society to execute illustrations of birds. In the same year, the Earl of Derby invited Lear to reside at his estate; Lear ended up staying on until 1836. His first book of poems, A Book of Nonsense (1846) was composed for the grandchildren of the Derby household. Around 1836 Lear decided to devote himself exclusively to landscape painting (although he continued to compose light verse). Between 1837 and 1847 Lear traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. After his return to England, Lear’s travel journals were published in several volumes as The Illustrated Travels of a Landscape Painter. Popular and respected in his day, Lear’s travel books have largely been ignored in the twentieth century. Rather, Lear is remembered for his humorous poems, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and as the creator of the form and meter of the modern limerick. Like his younger peer Lewis Carroll, Lear wrote many deeply fantastical poems about imaginary creatures, such as “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.” His books of humorous verse also include Nonsense Songs (1871) and Laughable Lyrics (1877). Lear died on January 29, 1888 at the age of 76. Although the subject and form of his works varies greatly, all of Lear’s poems can be characterized by his irreverent view of the world; Lear poked fun at everything, including himself in “By Way of a Preface.” Many critics view Lear’s devotion to the ridiculous as a method for dealing with or undermining the all-pervasive orderliness and industriousness of Victorian society. Regardless of impetus, the humor of Lear’s poems has proved irrefutably timeless. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844-1889) Hopkins was born at Startford, Essex, the eldest son of nine children. He was received into the Catholic Church and he was ordained a priest in 1877. He also became professor of Greek at University College, Dublin. Hopkins’s position in the history of English literature is rather unusual. His poetry was completely unknown in his lifetime because he refused to publish it, or even publicly admit that he wrote verse. He thought that his interest in poetry conflicted with his vocation as a priest, and would distract him from his duties. This position was wholly personal. The first edition of his poems, edited by his friend and poet Robert Bridges, appeared in 1918, thirty years after his death. This coincided with the appearance in England and America of literary Modernism, one of whose aims was to abolish the mellifluous diction of late Victorian and around improbable coincides of plot. His real subject was always the lives of ordinary men and woman. Vanity fair is subtitled “A novel without hero”. Thackeray knew that the modern world does not produce heroes and so novels should not be written about them. Thackeray’s characteristic technique is a skillful blending of essay and narrative: he tells a story but he enjoys commenting on it. He adopts the device of the all-knowing narrator collecting his troupe of comic, eccentric, selfish and ignorant figures for the amusement. He speaks as if the reader were sitting nex to him at his desk. CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816-1855) Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, the third of the six children of the reverend Patrick Prunty, an Anglican priest of Irish descent, and his wife Maria who died when Charlotte was young. Both parents were of Celtic origin, which meant for the children a background of fantastic storytelling and a belief in feeling and impulsive over reason. In 1820, they settled at Haworth, a small village on the wild and desolate Yorkshire moors. In an environment where the imagination was constantly stimulated by nature, the children created a fantasy world. She worked as a teacher. In 1846 Poems by Currier, Ellis and Acton Bell (the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne) was published but it sold only two copies. It was only in 1847 that the Brontë sisters’ work met with success. They published three novels: - Jane Eyre, by Charlotte; - Wuthering Heights, by Emily; - Agnes Grey, by Anne. Jane Eyre was her first novel to be published and to this day it remains her best-known work. It reflects much of the writer’s own life experiences, the sub-title is An autobiography. Jane is a poor orphan who is sent to a boarding school where she is subjected to stern discipline and harsh treatment. At 18 she finds work as a governess in a country estate owned by Mr Edward Rochester, a mysterious man, and she falls in love with him. The novel made quite a stir (una sorta di provocazione) in its time since the heroine shows a courage, a determination and a self-respect which contrast with Victorian ideals of female delicacy. Charlotte’s passionate woman are never slaves to love but are ready to sacrifice it to their own notions of honour and duty. We may see this in the final part of the novel: Jane goes back to Rochester only when she feels strong enough to do so, and the dialogue between the two shows that she is her who leads the game rather than surrendering to the man. The novel best qualities are a combination of realistic observation and fine humour with an intensity that recalls romantics. Nature is too important in the novel, both as setting and for its symbolic meaning: the final scene takes place in the countryside, and Jane chooses for Rochester and herself ‘a hidden and lovely spot’, in romantic style. Jane Eyre is the archetypal romantic novel. Realistic and autobiographical details are worked into a plot of romance and adventure. GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880) Mary Ann Evans, who adopt the pseudonym as George Eliot as a novelist, was born on a farm in Warwickshire, where her father worked. She grew up in the beautiful countryside that she was later to describe in her novels. She had a rigid and Evangelical family, reading extensively. In 1840, she moved to the town of Coventry with her father and she met important people, groups of intellectuals and free-thinkers, that caused her to abandon her religious belief. In London she fell in love with George Henry Lewes, a brilliant critic. He was already married and did not get to divorce but they lived together in 1854 as people married. Her first work was Scenes of Clerical Life, a series of story centred in a simple life of country people. It came out in Blackwood magazine in instalments, under the pen name George Eliot. In 1859 Adam Bede came out, a novel in which religion plays an important role. Adam discovers his true love for a Methodist female preacher who helps him and his previous fiancé. The book established Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist for its realistic portrayal of rural life. Eliot’s first masterpiece was The Mill on the Floss, another world of her childhood, appeared in 1860. The story set in the English midlands has as its central characters Maggie Tulliver, the daughter of the miller of Dovecote Mill, on the river floss. Maggie is an intelligent and sensitive young girl, much more than her family. Her brother Tom is on the contrary a rather dull and unimaginative boy, though he had the qualities Maggie lacks: he is practical, decided, firm in his belief. Maggie feels painfully her situation: she has all the mental gifts that would entitle her to having a good education, but she is a girl and will not receive none. Her father admits that she is the only one to have a brain in a family. The first part of a book, Tom and Maggie’s childhood, is a brilliant description of provincial life shown with typical humour. The contrast between the children’s characters introduces one of the novel’s main themes: intelligence and independence are important but they are contrasted by social convention, thus plunging that person into misery and suffering. The second part, adult life of children, deals with Maggie “unfortunate loves”, in particular for Stephen Guest, who is enganged with her cousin. George Eliot wrote later Middlemarch: A study of provincial life, serialised from 1871 to 1872. It is set on a small town of the same name. Various personal stories of disillusion, failure, despair and partial fulfilment meet in a world, which is provincial in the two senses of far from the capital and ignorant of current ideas. The second part of title suggests an occasion for comments on social and political issues of period. George Eliot’s best novels are set in the rural Midlands and most of his works are linked to Jane Austen, but she took the novel of manners one step further by combining with it philosophical and intellectual subjects and by endowing it with psychological depth. She was interested in the interplay of human lives in a definite time and place, usually describing groups of characters that display the social and economic forces at work in community. She was the first novelist to perceive that there is a direct relation between a person’ character and his environment, but she insisted that she could and should make moral choices that she still had a certain measure of free will in spite all condition. In addition, Eliot portrays geographical places, exterior and interior scenes, people or clothes. She analyses problems of conscience by posing them to a particular character rather than presenting them as a general cases. George Eliot frequently likened herself to a historian and scientist. In doing so she was distancing herself from the melodramatic style of the first generation of Victorian novelist (like Dickens) and stressing her careful observation of life in its minute details. Eliot’s realism works at different levels. In her novels the hero or heroine is no longer the focal point of the story; ordinary people are investigated instead and opened up to show the many contradictory aspects that make up a single personality. She uses omniscient narrator. It do not know only everything but also intrudes upon the narration, comments on a character’s action and choices. It also discriminates and organises the events and social opinions presented in the story and gives us a complete vision both of their psychology and their social interaction. Eliot insisted on omniscient narrator to put her personal moral lesson. THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) Hardy was born near Dorchester in Dorset. He frequented an architect office but he wanted to became a writer. He married Emma Gildford in 1874 and they settled at Max Gate, The Casterbridge of his novels. Hardy invented the term ‘Wessex’, which means land of west Saxons. Its people were still of superstitious and practiced ritual or propitiatory ceremonies. Typical of Wessex novels are the journey that the people take through Wessex, with one place as the point of departure and arrival and other places as stages in the rise and fall of the character’s hopes. Hardy’s stories are told by an omniscient narrator who occasionally puts in his opinion on life. A constant theme in Hardy’s novels is man’s struggle with the indifferent forces, both inside and outside himself, that control his life: an event or action in a person’s life sets in motion a whole series of other relates events and coincidences in which she is inexorably trapped as if in some placable mechanism. Hardy was influenced by Schopenhauer and the idea of an immanent will, a universal power indifferent if not outright hostile to the fate of man. Hardy refuses any belief in a providential universe. In contrast with the Victorian optimism based in progress, he adopted Schopenhauer’s idea. His most important novel is Tess of the D’Ubervilles published first in 1891 in three volumes. Substantial parts of it had already appeared in newspaper and magazines, in episodes. The story is a combination of imagination, semi-autobiographical events and real though romanticised facts. The story of the woman who had been hanged for killing her seducer he had heard as a boy. The plots of Hardy’s novels have sometimes been seen as improbable or exaggerated, Tess is a case in point. Tess in carefully constructed and divided in parts, here called phases. Each part corresponds to a phase of Tess’s life, but also different season of the year. When Hardy subtitled his novel “a pure woman” he wanted to stress his disagreement with current Victorian morality. The truth is she was an innocent young girl, pure at heart, crushed by a serious by a series of unhappy circumstances due to the chance and due to the way people behave towards her. In his novels and in his epic poem The Dynast, Hardy sees life’s events as governed by a principle that has close affinities with the Greek hamartia or tragic error, a fault or a crime that, as in Oedipus case, does not depend on individual will. Tess is the victim of a chain of events which she has really little control. The universe is controlled by chance or blind casualty. Hardy himself called a collection of his stories Life’s little ironies. He has been criticised for making use of such series of incidents as happen to Tess in too mechanical a way; there are too many of them, they become symbols rather than real events. Hardy provides many inspired descriptions of nature, but unlike Wordsworth, he gives nature no consoling role. Wessex is setting role for men fighting against implacable forces, a stage on which fate, history and the pressure of society on human character are manipulated into tragic patterns. Nature is both indifferent to man and hostile to man and hostile to him at the same time. From 1896 to 1928 he published poetry and his influence on modernist poets, as Eliot and Pound. His first volume in verse was Wessex Poems. He wrote 900 poems during his life. One of these poems are IN TIME OF THE BREAKING OF NATIONS, a short and simple poem in which he explored his favourite themes: the continuity of ordinary life, that seems to fall victim to great events, war in this case, but finally triumphs because generation follows generation. Hardy’s poems are extremely varied in forms, including narrative ballads, folksongs and lyrics. A distinctive poem is about his dead wife Emma and THE DYNASTS dealing with the Napoleonic wars.