Charlotte Bronte Biography Part I

Charlotte was born in Yorkshire in 1816, to Patrick Bronte an Irish man and Maria Branwell, who was from Cornwall. She went to a school where the girls were ill treated and half starved, and her older sisters ;Maria and Elizabeth died. Patrick brought her and Emily home. In 1831 she went to school again, to Miss Wooler's school where she was quite happy. She made 2 good friends at the, Ellen Nussey a quiet conventional ladylike girl and Mary Taylor who was a much more interesting radical minded girl who was later to go to New Zealand. Charlotte was the only Bronte girl to make any friends at school. After completing her education Charlotte took a job as a teacher at Miss Woolers’s school, but she didn’t enjoy being a teacher. Her passion was for writing.

Lady Gregory part I

Augusta Lady Gregory was a key figure in Irish cultural nationalism and the development of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland. She was a member of the Anglo Irish upper class but she turned to supporting the Nationalist movement. She was born Isabella Augusta Persse in in 1852 in Galway and was brought up there in an aristocratic family. Her childhood nanny was an Irish Catholic who taught her about Irish history and folklore. She had a good home education… and was an intelligent girl.She married comparatively late, at the age of 28. Her husband, Sir William Gregory was much older than her, but he was a well educated man who had been Governor of Ceylon, and had also been a member of Parliament.  He was interested in writing. He had a house in London and the couple enjoyed living there and playing host to many literary figures. They also had an estate in Ireland, Coole Park in Galway and they travelled abroad frequently. They had one son, Robert who later became a pilot in World War I. Augusta was fond of her husband and was no doubt glad to have found a man who shared her intellectual interests. But he was much older than her and during her travels abroad she had an affair with the poet Wilfred Blunt….She wrote love poems to him, and began to take an interest in nationalist movements. She kept a journal and began to hone her writing skills. Wilfred Blunt was a supporter of Arab nationalism.. Augusta was still like most of her class, against the idea of Irish independence and wrote a pamphlet against Home Rule…

Jane Seymour final Part

Parke Godwin Arthurian writer

Parke Godwin was an American writer, who was one of the first to write about Arthurian themes. He was born in New York city in 1929 and was the grandson of a well known journalist. He worked in several jobs including acting and working in advertising. But he wanted to write and was a prolific writer of Science Fiction. In 1980 he published his first Arthurian novel Firelord, which is a realistic re telling of the Arthur story. He was knowledgeable about Dark Ages history and portrayed Arthur as a soldier, and an active ruler. After Firelord he wrote a second novel about Guenevere, set in the Saxon England that came after Arthur’s defeat and death. Guenevere becomes a servant in a Saxon household and learns more about ordinary people. In Firelord, Morgana who is usually portrayed as an evil character and Arthur’s half sister, is a more sympathetic person, who is Arthur’s first wife and a leader of the wild “faery” Prydn people… who lead a nomadic life. Guenevere is from an aristocratic background and cannot understand Morgana…. he also works the Tristan and Isolde story into the book and gives a sympathetic slant on Guenevere’s affair with Lancelot. In the '90's, he wrote novels about Robin Hood, again setting it in a realistic mediaeval England. Godwin died in 2013, in California.

Jane Seymour Part II

It's hard to get a picture of Jane’s personality. There are no letters from Henry to her, and her reign as queen was very short. She caused no scandals, and died when her child was a newborn..She engaged in flirtation with Henry, which infuriated Anne Boleyn. Anne was afraid that having lost her baby in January, Henry was angry that she had again failed to provide him with an heir. Katherine had died in January so if he were to end his marriage to Anne, people would not say that he had to return to Katherine…There are stories of Anne berating Jane for accepting a present from Henry of a locket.. but Henry is supposed to have told his angry wife that she should shut her eyes to his mistresses, as Katherine had done. Anne herself was behaving eccentrically in the months after her miscarriage… She flirted with the young men of her circle, encouraging them to declare their love for her… Her marriage to Henry was under strain and this was playing with fire. There was a convention of “courtly love” where young men professed admiration for the queen, but Anne was not a royal like Katherine had been and she did not seem to be able to keep the playing and flirting at a sensible level. She encouraged it and then became frightened. She found that young Mark Smeaton, one of her musicians, was also “sighing for love of her” and told him that she could not speak to him as to one of the court gentlemen, as he was an inferior person. But her conduct did give a wrong impression. Jane may have believed that Anne was guilty of adultery.