Authors Like Anne Brontë

Mary Wollstonecraft

English · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798)

Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) worked as a lady's companion and then as governess to the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family before turning to writing. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that women only appear inferior to men because they are denied an education. Her unfinished novel Maria, published after her death, follows a wife confined in an asylum by her husband. She died eleven days after giving birth to Mary Shelley, and her widower's frank memoir of her love affairs damaged her reputation for nearly a century.

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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.

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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.

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Charlotte Brontë

English · Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853)

Charlotte (1816–1855) published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell in October 1847, two months before her sisters' first novels. After Anne's death she prevented The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being republished, and in 1850 she called its choice of subject “a mistake”. She outlived all five of her siblings and died in March 1855, aged 38.

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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 The first edition of The Life of Charlotte Brontë was withdrawn after complaints from people it portrayed, including those connected with the school behind Lowood, and revised editions followed within months.

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George Eliot

English · Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Middlemarch (1871–72)

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880). Her first fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857; its last story, “Janet's Repentance”, follows Janet Dempster, whose lawyer husband drinks heavily and abuses her until he throws her out of the house. Middlemarch follows Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who makes a disastrous marriage.

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Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was born in London in 1824 and was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, whose magazine All the Year Round serialised The Woman in White in 1859–60. The novel, in which a young heiress is shut in an asylum under another woman's name, is told by several narrators in turn; The Moonstone is often called one of the first English detective novels. He died in 1889.

Henrik Ibsen

Norwegian · A Doll's House (1879), Hedda Gabler (1890)

Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright. A Doll's House premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on 21 December 1879: Nora Helmer has secretly forged her father's signature to borrow money for her husband's health, and when a blackmailer threatens to expose her she sees what her marriage is, and leaves her husband and children. For a German production he reluctantly wrote an ending in which Nora stays, and called it a “barbaric outrage”.

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Kate Chopin

American · Bayou Folk (1894), The Awakening (1899)

Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis in 1850 and died there in 1904. The Awakening follows Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother in New Orleans and on Grand Isle who turns away from the life expected of her; reviewers condemned its treatment of sexuality, motherhood and infidelity, and it fell out of print for decades until its rediscovery in the 1970s. In “The Story of an Hour” (1894), a wife feels free on hearing of her husband's death.

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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.

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