(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: threesisters and a brother. They are alone in alarge old house, miles from anywhere. Theweather outside is stormy, or “wuthering”(呼啸的) as local people call it. There’s noone home but a servant in the kitchen below.Their mother is dead and their father, apriest (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, evenmade-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 passionatebut doomed.The one and only novel by Emily Bronte is oneof the strangest and most disturbing in the history ofEnglish literature. Indeed, Wuthering Heights (1847)was too much for the book’s first readers. Onereviewer didn’t hold back on his feelings: “We knownothing in our fictitious literature … which presentssuch shocking pictures of the worst forms ofhumanity (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,drunkenness (酒醉), kidnapping (诱拐) and much, much more. But there is also passion, whether it is the passion of hate or of love.Speaking of love, Wuthering Heights is famously the love story of Catherine and Heathcliff. Catherine is one of Mr. Earnshaw’s two children. They live in Wuthering Heights high in the Yorkshire countryside, a place that is similar to where Emily lived. Heathcliff is an orphan(孤儿) boy who comes into the house as a worker.He and Catherine are always together as children. They spend a lot of time getting into trouble on the moors together. Their relationship is so strong that they say more than once that they are each other. Although old Mr. Earnshaw loves Heathcliff, Catherine’s brother Hindley hates him.Still, it is not Hindley so much as social structure (结构) that ruins Heathcliff and Catherine’s love. The other “great house” of the novel is Thrushcross Grange. It is home to the well-to-do Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella.Catherine falls in love with Edgar, or rather falls in love with an idea of him. Edgar is very attractive to the snob (势利小人) in her. She even tells Nelly, the housekeeper and the woman who mainly tells t he story, that it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff. So, Catherine marries Edgar, but her separation from her natural partner causes her to get sick and eventually die. Meanwhile, Healthcliff marries Isabella out of revenge and treats her with great cruelty.Heathcliff comes to a sad, bitter end, fitting the way he has lived his life. But there is hope for the children of the novel. Hareton, the son of Hindley, and Cathy, the daughter of Catherine, are planning to get married when the story ends.Romance like fight感受简·爱的人格魅力。