Authors Like Charlotte Brontë

Ann Radcliffe

English · The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797)

Radcliffe (1764–1823) was the most celebrated Gothic novelist of the 1790s. Her heroines are young women alone in castles and abbeys, threatened by men who control their money and movements, and her mysteries usually turn out to have a natural explanation. Jane Austen parodied her in Northanger Abbey, whose heroine has been reading Udolpho.

Jane Austen

English · Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817)

Austen (1775–1817) published four novels anonymously in her lifetime, all about young women of the gentry negotiating marriage, money and family; Persuasion and Northanger Abbey appeared after her death. In a letter to the critic G. H. Lewes in 1848, Charlotte Brontë called Pride and Prejudice “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers”, with no open country and no fresh air.

Every book by Jane Austen →

Emily Brontë

English · Wuthering Heights (1847)

Emily (1818–1848) published one novel, Wuthering Heights, in December 1847 as Ellis Bell, two months after Jane Eyre, and contributed poems to the sisters' 1846 collection. The novel follows Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the Yorkshire moors, told through a housekeeper and a tenant. She died of tuberculosis at Haworth in December 1848, aged 30.

Every book by Emily Brontë →

Anne Brontë

English · Agnes Grey (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Anne (1820–1849) worked as a governess before publishing as Acton Bell, and Agnes Grey draws on that work. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in June 1848, follows Helen Graham, who leaves her drunken, abusive husband and supports her son by painting. After Anne's death Charlotte blocked a reprint in England, calling its subject “unfortunately chosen”; it was out of print there until 1854.

Every book by Anne Brontë →

Elizabeth Gaskell

English · Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854–55), The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)

Gaskell (1810–1865) was the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester and wrote novels about mill workers and mill owners. She met Charlotte Brontë in 1850 and, at Patrick Brontë's request, wrote her life after her death. The first edition of The Life of Charlotte Brontë was withdrawn after complaints from people it portrayed, including those connected with the school behind Lowood, and revised editions followed within months.

Every book by Elizabeth Gaskell →

George Eliot

English · Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–72)

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who worked as a translator and editor before turning to fiction in her late thirties. For more than twenty years she lived openly with the critic G. H. Lewes, who was married to someone else; he was the same Lewes to whom Brontë had written about Austen. Middlemarch follows Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who makes a disastrous marriage, among the lives of a provincial town.

Every book by George Eliot →

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

American · “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Women and Economics (1898), Herland (1915)

Gilman (1860–1935) wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” after being prescribed a rest cure for depression: its narrator, confined to an upstairs room by her physician husband, comes to believe a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper. She became a leading lecturer on women's economic independence. Her writing also promoted eugenics and made openly racist arguments, which modern readers have had to reckon with.

Every book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman →

Daphne du Maurier

British · Rebecca (1938), Frenchman's Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 and spent most of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1989. Rebecca follows a shy young second wife at Manderley, where her husband's dead first wife is present in every room, and ends with the house in flames. In 1941 critics pointed out similarities between Rebecca and the Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco's A Sucessora (1934); du Maurier said she had never heard of the book.

Every book by Daphne du Maurier →

Jean Rhys

Dominican-British · Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Rhys was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica, in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother, and came to England at sixteen. After her novels of the 1930s she largely disappeared from view until Wide Sargasso Sea, which gives the first Mrs Rochester a name, Antoinette Cosway, and a Caribbean childhood. She died in 1979.

Every book by Jean Rhys →

Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Little Stranger (2009), The Paying Guests (2014)

Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in 1966 and wrote a PhD on lesbian and gay historical fiction before her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998). Fingersmith, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is set in 1860s London and a country house, where a young thief is sent as a maid to help swindle an heiress. The Little Stranger is a ghost story in a decaying Warwickshire house after the Second World War.

Every book by Sarah Waters →