Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third surviving child of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. She died on 31 March 1855, not yet thirty-nine years old, after creating a body of work that transformed the English novel. Though chiefly celebrated as a novelist, she began as a poet, wrote poetry throughout her life, and brought a poet’s inten…
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
In the grand tapestry of 19th-century American literature, certain figures shine with the steady brilliance of established stars, while others flicker with a more complex, mercurial light. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) belongs decidedly to the latter category—a writer whose life and work embodied the tensions, aspirations, and contradictions of a young nation struggling to define its cultural identity. Neither…
“I never sent you one of those homespun letters, in fact, without quite a persuasion that it will be the last. But life always seems to keep new, somehow; and a present hour always seems to me worthy any two of the past or the future.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony