UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · CHILDREN · FICTION
Charlotte Brontë
Also known as: Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels are English literature standards. Under the pen name Currer Bell, she wrote Jane Eyre. : Her sisters, Anne and Emily, first published their works as Acton and Ellis Bell.
MY godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.
— from Villette, a novel
Most acclaimed
Villette, a novel
In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Selected poems
1990
Charles Olson, the poet who coined the word post-modern and helped shape the generation that would emerge under its mantle, is known for the immense range of his intellectual and poetic reach. Here, in this selection by Robert Creeley, Olson's personal friend and literary ally, is the more "intimate order" of the poet who sought to embrace all of history and human thought. Olson came from working-class immigrant roots in a Massachusetts mill town. A scholar of profound originality and vision, he worked for Roosevelt's administration during the war years, then at Black Mountain, the prototypical experimental college and enclave of avantgarde writers and artists. In 1957 he settled in Gloucester, a town on the shore north of Boston where he had spent summers as a child. It was Gloucester, with its richness of history and human use, that provided the ground of The Maximus Poems, begun as letters some years before and which over the next two decades grew into a masterwork of epic dimensions. From the more than three hundred poems making up The Maximus Poems and the comparable number in Olson's Collected Poems, Creeley's selection makes available for the first time an essential sampling of Olson's poetry. Included are paradigmatic early works like "The Kingfishers," which Guy Davenport called "the most modern of American poems, the most energetically influential text in the last thirty-five years," as well as familiar pieces from Maximus like "Maximus, to Gloucester" and "Celestial Evening." Also represented are less known poems, such as "The chain of memory is resurrection" and "The Lamp," works that reveal a more personal side of this major American poet. Together these poems demonstrate Olson's genius and grace, a poet as at home in Gloucester as in the cosmos, a reckoner with dreams and myths, and "Western man at the limit of himself."
The spell
When the infant Marquis of Almeida is pronounced dead, the kingdoms of Wellingtonsland and Angria are deprived of their heir. Anxious to secure the nations' future security, King Zamorna's advisers entreat him to name his successor—and when Zamorna himself succumbs to a mysterious, life-threatening sickness, the need becomes more urgent still. Yet Zamorna remains strangely unperturbed. Confusion turns to political intrigue as those closest to him wonder exactly what it is he knows and who, precisely, are the mysterious characters surrounding him.