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A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic"
A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic"
A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic"
Ebook34 pages25 minutes

A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 2, 2016
ISBN9781535829946
A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic"

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    A Study Guide for Emily Bronte's "The Old Stoic" - Gale

    10

    The Old Stoic

    Emily Brontë

    1846

    Introduction

    The Brontë family was a remarkable literary phenomenon in the first half of the nineteenth century. The father of the family, Patrick Brontë, was an Irish farm boy who lifted himself up by his own literary and scholarly efforts to become a country parson of the Church of England. The four children who survived to adulthood became important authors. Two of them, Charlotte and Emily, wrote novels considered among the most important in English literary history: Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. The other two siblings, Branwell and Anne, also made outstanding literary achievements, but all four died young, probably of tuberculosis.

    Emily Brontë's The Old Stoic is part of the body of poetry produced by the Brontë siblings that has been generally neglected in favor of their famous novels. The poem first appeared in 1846 in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, a collection of verse that included poems by all three sisters. The Old Stoic is one of the few pieces of poetry by any of the Brontës to go into wide circulation, appearing, for instance, in every edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. The poem is an idealized description of a Stoic philosopher. It expresses his innermost thoughts and ideals as disdain for the common desires of humanity and then as a prayer to the gods.

    The literary work of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, as well as that of their brother Branwell, grew out of their collaborative childhood writing projects, or juvenilia, in which they built up a consistent picture of fantasy worlds of their own creation. Although specific references to the fantasy realms of Angria and Gondal were carefully edited out of the publications, The Old Stoic and even Wuthering Heights were originally part of, or at least intimately connected to, this fantasy literature produced by the Brontës.

    Author Biography

    Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, England. Two years later, her family moved to Haworth in Yorkshire, where she would spend almost her entire life. She had two sisters, Charlotte

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