The Bronts and Education

All the seven Bront novels are concerned with education in both senses, that of upbringing as well as that of learning. The Bront sisters all worked as teachers before they became published novelists. In spite of the prevalence of education in the sisters' lives and fiction, however, this was the first full-length book on the subject when it was published in 2007. Marianne Thormhlen explores how their representations of fictional teachers and schools engage with the intense debates on education in the nineteenth century, drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence about educational theory and practice in the lifetime of the Bronts. This study offers much information both about the Bronts and their books and about the most urgent issue in early nineteenth-century British social politics: the education of the people, of all classes and both sexes.