Join Ed as he reviews the literary history of the Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – who revolutionized the English novel in the 1840s, and celebrates the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth. By combining the earlier Gothic-Romantic tradition in novels and travel literature, genres developed primarily by women authors (think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of 1818), with mid-century Realism, the sisters crafted a new, highly relevant, literary form that both illustrated the vulnerability of women in Victorian society while pointing to their economic and political emancipation. Art, architecture, and historic Bronte sites will be described as well as landmark works: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.