‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ reveals Brontë at her most experimental as she explores the use of different narrative voices, including that of an unnamed genderless ‘ghost’, to tell a story from different perspectives. [...] It also shows Brontë representing a child's experience of extreme physical abuse which goes far beyond the depictions of chastisement in Jane Eyre (1847).
The Story of Willie Ellin
Découvrez The Story of Willie Ellin, un fragment inédit et poignant de Charlotte Brontë, où l’auteure de Jane Eyre explore avec audace la souffrance d’un enfant maltraité.
This unfinished fragment contains the poignant story of an abused child. After abandoning the work, Charlotte later incorporated it into another work called 'Emma'.
Charlotte Brontë (1816 - 1855), English writer noted for her novel Jane Eyre (1847) and sister of Anne Brontë and Emily Brontë. The three sisters are almost as famous for their short, tragic lives as for their novels. In their works they described love more truthfully that was common in Victorian age England. In the past 40 years Charlotte Brontë's reputation has risen rapidly, and feminist criticism has done much to show that she was speaking up for oppressed women of every age.
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Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) est une romancière anglaise, célèbre pour son chef-d’œuvre Jane Eyre (1847), publié sous le pseudonyme masculin de Currer Bell. Figure majeure de la littérature victorienne, elle a marqué l’histoire littéraire par sa représentation audacieuse des femmes et des injustices sociales. Avec ses sœurs Anne et Emily, elle forme un trio d’autrices dont les vies brèves et les œuvres intenses continuent de fasciner. The Story of Willie Ellin, écrit en 1853, est l’un de ses derniers textes, témoignant de son génie inachevé et de son exploration de nouveaux horizons narratifs.
newsmode Revue de presse
It’s a Brontë work unlike any other. [...] It is a tale of sibling cruelty and abuse that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dickens novel, or even Wuthering Heights. What I love most about Willie Ellin, however, is the second fragment which seems to deal with a supernatural element – a spirit who ‘came to consciousness within the rim of twilight’ and seems to have haunted the spot ever since.
This will be less in the nature of a review and more in the manner of a musing as I look over Charlotte Brontë’s several attempts at either rewriting or beginning a novel in the handful of years before her untimely death. As I contemplate these five fragments called The Story of Willie Ellin I wonder at their cohesiveness or lack of it, their relationship to the then as yet unpublished The Professor, and their parallels with themes in Shirley.