勃朗特姐妹专辑.doc

探访英国文学之勃朗特姐妹：
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: three sisters and a brother. They are alone in a large old house, miles from anywhere. The weather outside is stormy, or “wuthering” (呼啸的) as local people call it. There’s no one home but a servant in the kitchen below. Their mother is dead and their father, a priest (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, even made-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?
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What can we find from the so-called “The Young Men’s Magazine”?
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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
Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is passionate but doomed.
The one and only novel by Emily Bronte is one of the strangest and most disturbing in the history of English literature. Indeed, Wuthering Heights (1847) was too much for the book’s first readers. One reviewer didn’t hold back on his feelings: “We know nothing in our fictitious literature … which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity (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 the 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。
词数 489 建议阅读时间 8分钟
Charlotte Bronte’s most famous novel Jane Eyre (1847) is hardly less wild than her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. It has something very scary in it that any horror film director would be proud to put on screen. In the attic (阁楼) of the hero, Mr. Rochester, there is a mad woman locked up. It is Rochester’s wife. Bronte keeps this secret as closely as Rochester, until the prisoner gets her revenge (复仇) on her husband near the end of the book.
Still, this novel belongs to Jane Eyre. We meet her at the beginning when she is an orphan being raised by her uncle’s family. This early part of her life is difficult and shows the greater problems that are to come. Some of the most famous scenes are set in a terrible school, the Lowood Institution, run by a terrible man called Mr. Brocklehurst.
Jane makes her first friend at Lowood, Helen Burns. Although they are friends, the two girls have quite different outlooks. Helen accepts the cruelty that life throws at her. Jane, on the other hand, fights back. Helen dies, but Jane survives. One feels that there is a lesson in that for readers.
By the time she reaches adulthood, Jane is a determined young woman. Jane finds a job as a governess (家庭女教师) in a great home. She teaches the young daughter of a mysterious and seemingly unpleasant man, Mr. Rochester.
The novel is most famous for the passionate (热切的) romance between Jane and Rochester. It is, or was, an original romance. Jane and Rochester are far from Romeo and Juliet, and they are very different from the lovers in Jane Austen’s novels too. Rochester is older than Jane and he is not handsome. And yet it is his spirit that attracts her. He does not make a secret of his feelings and neither does Jane.
The romance between Jane and Rochester is sometimes like a fight. There are many obstacles (障碍) for both of them to overcome, including Rochester asking Jane to run away with him as his mistress (情妇). After the fire that destroys the home kills the first Mrs. Rochester and blinds and disables Mr. Rochester himself, the pair are free to marry.
Jane is something of a feminist icon (女权主义代表). She has fought all through her life; she is not about to settle for anything other than what her heart wants when it comes to marriage. There is another suitor (追求者), but it has to be Rochester. But even though she marries Mr. Rochester in the end, he is a different man from the figure she met at first. She has changed him.

Yorkshire shows Brontes’ inspiration
Haworth in West Yorkshire is known as “Bronte Country”. MCT
走进勃朗特姐妹的故乡。词数 520 建议阅读时间 8分钟
TODAY companies that serve tourists do very well in “Bronte country”, as it’s now known. Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the Brontes were born and raised, and the area around it, are now famous because of them. Visitors from all over the world can visit the parsonage (牧师住宅) they lived in, which is a museum. They can also take a tour around sites that are said to have inspired the sisters in their work. A ruin in a place called “Top Withens” has always been thought to be the place that Emily Bronte based Wuthering Heights on.
A few miles away is Ponden Hall, said to be the original Thrushcross Grange, the home of some Wuthering Heights characters: Edgar, Isabella and, for a while, Catherine Linton. Although it’s a handsome building, one can imagine a girl like Catherine – wild and free by nature – feeling trapped (受困的) by it, saying to herself, as she does on her sickbed in the novel, “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage (半开化的) and hardy (强壮的). I’m sure I should be myself again were I once among the heather (欧石南) on those hills. Open the window again wide.”
But it` s the nature in the area that is most impressive. The buildings are very large, and, when you feel the strong winds that come out of nowhere, you can understand why they were built like that. The moors (荒野) are frightening (骇人的). We should never forget that this is a place where people worked, not a place where they went on holiday.
The Earnshaws in Wuthering Heights are farmers. While Catherine was enjoying herself on the hills in the heather, there was a hard living to be earned from this tough (恶劣的) countryside. Learn a little bit about the place’s history, outside of the Bronte legend, and you realize that Haworth and the area around it was often violent in a way that had little to do with romantic feeling. During the early industrial revolution, great arguments between employers and workers happened there.
Not that there aren` t beautiful spots. Near the church, where the Brontes are buried together, there` s a waterfall called the Bronte Waterfall. Charlotte described it as follows: “fine indeed; a perfect torrent (急流) racing over the rocks, white and beautiful”. The beauty of the area comes from the way it can quickly change completely. When the sun comes out from behind a cloud, the whole scene seems different.
Perhaps these quick changes were on Emily’s mind when she wrote the scene in which Mr. Lockwood visits the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff. The weather is calm on that day. There are moths flying “among the heath and harebells” and a “soft wind breathing through the grass”. It is quite impossible for Mr. Lockwood to imagine “unquiet slumbers (睡眠) for the sleepers in that quiet earth”.
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