By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Brontë sisters are best-known as novelists: Emily gave us Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte offered Jane Eyre. But from a very young age, before they penned some of the greatest novels of the Victorian era, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell – the names they adopted as their pseudonyms – were poets.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 4th of December
1131: Omar Khayyám dies. This Persian poet and mathematician wrote the Rubaiyat (or ‘quatrains’), later translated into English by several Victorian poets, most famously by Edward FitzGerald.
1835: Samuel Butler is born. This unusual Victorian novelist is best known for The Way of All Flesh (1903), a semi-autobiographical novel that attacked Victorian hypocrisy and religion so vehemently that Butler arranged for the novel only to be published after his death.