1. Charlotte Brontë
Works
1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
1847 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (as Currer Bell).
1849 Shirley: A Tale (as Currer Bell).
1853 Villette (1853)
1857The Professor: A Tale
1925 The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories, ed. C. K. Shorter and E. W. Hatfield
1971 Legends of Angria: Compiled from the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, ed. W. Gérin.

2. Charlotte Brontë: Her Life
1816 Born at Thornton, Yorkshire, the third daughter of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë.
1820 The family moves to Haworth, where Patrick Brontë has become rector.
1821 Maria Brontë dies of cancer; her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moves in with the family.
1824 Patrick Brontë sends his two oldest daughters, Elizabeth and Maria, to school at Wakefield. They then transfer to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire. Charlotte and Emily join them here; it will be the model for the school in Jane Eyre. Elizabeth and Maria both return home, to die of consumption.
Charlotte and Emily return home. To amuse themselves, they fill thousands of pages in miniature books with fictions about the imaginary Kingdom of Angria. Their brother, Branwell (born 1817), and their youngest sister, Anne (born 1820), eventually help develop the stories.
1831 Charlotte attends Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, near Huddersfield.
1832 Returns home to teach her sisters.
1835 Returns to Roe Head as a teacher.
1838 Resigns her position and returns to Haworth.
1839 Rejects a marriage proposal from the Reverend Henry Nussey, Ellen's brother. Also turns down a proposal from another young clergyman.
Charlotte and Emily go to Brussels to study French and German. Soon their aunt, Miss Branwell, dies, leaving each niece and nephew a small sum, which enables both to return home.
1844 Tries to start a school at the Haworth parsonage, but no pupils come.
1845 Branwell is fired as tutor for making love to his employer's wife; he spends three years at home drinking, taking drugs, and otherwise indulging himself until he dies of his excesses.

3. Charlotte Brontë: Her Life
1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne publish at their own expense a joint volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton. Only two copies are sold. Charlotte's novel The Professor is rebuffed by publishers. She begins Jane Eyre while caring for her father's recovery from an eye operation.
1847 Publishes Jane Eyre , an immediate success.
1848 Both Branwell and Emily die. Before her death, Emily infects Anne with consumption. Charlotte, interrupting her writing on her new novel, Shirley, attempts to nurse Anne back to health.
1849 Anne dies of consumption. Charlotte finishes and publishes Shirley.
1851 Travels to London three times as guest of her publisher; meets Thackeray. Journeys to the Lake Country, to Scotland, and to Manchester, where she visits Elizabeth Gaskell, her future biographer. Rejects a marriage proposal from James Taylor, a member of her publishing house.
1853 Publishes Villette, a novel set in Brussels.
1854 Marries her fourth suitor, Arthur Bell Nichols, her father's curate, who does not share her intellectual interests but who makes her happy. Begins but does not finish a novel, Emma.
1855 Dies in pregnancy; is buried at the Haworth parsonage.
1857 Her previously rejected novel The Professor is published posthumously.

4. Charlotte Brontë: Literary Contexts
Romanticism
1780 – 1832
William Blake; Mary Wollstonecraft; William Godwin; William Wordsworth; Lord Byron; Persy Bysshe Shelley; Mary (Wollstonecraft Godwin) Shelley; John Keats; Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The Victorian Novel
1837 – 1901 (The Reign of Queen Victoria)
Anthony Trollope; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; William Makepeace Thackeray; Elizabeth Gaskell; Robert Louis Stevenson; Oscar Wilde; Thomas Hardy.
The Gothic Novel
18th Century – present
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otronto; Ann Radcliffe, The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho; Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (a parody of the genre); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

5. Victorian Dream Theories: A Casebook
Kathleen, Danabelle: “The Prophetic Character of Dreams” by Robert Macnish, from The Philosophy of Sleep, 1830
Melissa, Eileen: “On Sleep, and the Relations of Dreaming and Insanity” by Henry Holland, from Chapters on Mental Physiology, 1852
Sara, Michael: “A Theory of Dreaming” by George Henry Lewes, from The Physiology of Common Life,
Fotini, Elyse: “Dreams, as Illustrations of Involuntary Cerebration” by Frances Power Cobbe, from Darwinism in Morals and Other Essays, 1872
Brett, Jocelyn: “The Dream as Revelation” by James Sully, 1893
Identify the following from your assigned excerpts and be prepared to discuss them with the class:
A striking sentence.
A claim or idea that’s still relevant today, based on what you know about contemporary dream theory.
A claim or idea that seems crazy.
An interesting connection between ideas or details in your excerpt and Jane Eyre.