This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this perceptive book, John Pfordresher shares the enthralling story of how Charlotte Bronte wrote her masterpiece and why she tried so vehemently to disown it. What few people knew then-and even fewer know today-was that as she tended her invalid father and held the family together, Bronte was re-imagining her experiences as a governess, her fears for her dissolute brother and her devastating passion for a married man into an immersive, brilliant novel. By aligning the details of Bronte's life with the timeless characters and plot of Jane Eyre, Pfordresher reveals the remarkable parallels between one of literature's most beloved heroines and its vulnerable and deeply human creator and why Bronte didn't want those parallels exposed.

This richly illustrated book traces the development of a specifically Catholic imagination from its roots in the thought-world of Jesus to Catholic art at the end of the first millennium.