(全英文)勃朗特姐妹生平轶事及作品背景解析

Reading sisters' imagination

“The Young Men’s Magazine” MCT

品读勃朗特姐妹的想象世界。

词数499 建议阅读时间8分钟

Imagine four little children: three

sisters and a brother. They are alone in a

large old house, miles from anywhere. The

weather outside is stormy, or “wuthering”

(呼啸的) as local people call it. There’s no

one home but a servant in the kitchen below.

Their mother is dead and their father, a

priest (牧师), is out seeing the people who go to his church. But even when he is at home, he is distant and serious. They play, like all children play, but with a passion (热情) and imagination that is rare and remarkable.

The children’s names were Charlotte, Emily and Anne; their brother was called Branwell. They lived 200 years ago in a little place called Haworth in West Yorkshire in the north of England. Three of them became famous as adults, and even more after their (sadly early) deaths. The Bronte sisters, as they are known, made a mark on the literature of their country. Their two most famous novels, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights, have been copied by a thousand other writers and read by millions in almost every language that people speak. April 21 marked the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth.

In 2011, an amazing discovery was made that takes us back to the large creaky (破旧的) house that stood 200 years ago. It is a very small notebook called “The Young Men’s Magazine”. The auctioneer (拍卖商) who sold it said that it was half the size of a credit card (信用卡). On its 19 pages there are thousands of words – 4,000 of them to be exact. The “magazine” has made-up advertisements (广告), news items, poems and stories in it. It shows the imagination of those children who, cut off from the world, were forced to invent their own.

When they get together, all young children play at inventing their own worlds. For most, these worlds are rather normal: doctors and nurses, soldiers and the like. This 200-year-old document (文件) shows that this was not the case with the Brontes. The imaginations of the Brontes were far larger than those of the average child. “The Young Men’s Magazine”, as the notebook is called, has stories, news and poems, even

made-up advertisements, which show the great creativity the sisters had as adults.

If we think about how Emily, Charlotte and Ann lived, we can imagine the forces that pushed them to be creative. They lived away from others in a lonely part of Yorkshire in the north of England. With no mother and a father who wasn’t with them, who could they turn to but each other? What else did they have other than their imaginations? The childhood they spent learning and playing together led to their famous novels and poems. That is where The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were born.

Questions to reflect on:

How did the Brontes sisters and brother spend their children? In what why did the young ages relate to the works of the sisters?

_____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ What can we find from the so-called “The Young Men’s Magazine”?

_____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Novel shows passion

《呼啸山庄》：情感浓烈的杰作。词数406 建

议阅读时间6分钟

Hea thcliff and Catherine’s love is passionate

but doomed.

The one and only novel by Emily Bronte is one

of the strangest and most disturbing in the history of

English literature. Indeed, Wuthering Heights (1847)

was too much for the book’s first readers. One

reviewer didn’t hold back on his feelings: “We know

nothing in our fictitious literature … which presents

such shocking pictures of the worst forms of

humanity (人性).”

Today we may not agree with these thoughts on the novel, but reading it we can see how some readers in the 19th century might have reacted. There is violence,