Charlotte Brontë on the Pleasure of Hating

This month the paperback edition of Hatred and Civility. The Antisocial Life in Victorian England is published. It is written by Christopher Lane and published by Columbia University Press (originally published in 2003).

Today we grapple with numerous kinds of hatred, turning past ages into models of civility. However, by probing cultural history and the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad, Lane cogently undermines the myth of Victorian respectability. In lively, provocative prose, Hatred and Civility invites conservatives and radicals alike to rethink their assumptions about our supposedly moral precursors.

There's a chapter devoted to Charlotte Brontë with the title: Charlotte Brontë on the Pleasure of Hating.

The chapter begins with the following quote from Shirley (Chapter 10):

Reader! when you behold an aspect for whose constant gloom and frown you cannot account, whose unvarying cloud exasperates you by its apparent causelessness, be sure that there is a canker somewhere, and a canker not the less deeply corroding because concealed.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Charlotte_Brontë