Revisiting the Brontës in Women's Writing

The new issue of Women's Writing, a scholar journal published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) is entirely devoted to the Brontës:

Women's Writing, Volume 14 Issue 1 2007
Special Issue: REVISITING THE BRONTËS
ISSN: 1747-5848 (electronic) 0969-9082 (paper)
Publisher: Routledge

Table of Contents:
Introduction, 1 – 3

Experiments in Fiction: Charlotte Brontë's Last Angrian Tales, 4 – 22
Author: Heather Glen
Abstract: Charlotte Brontë's last tales of Angria, written between 1838 and 1839, are not the private, self-expressive "trance-writings" that they have sometimes been taken to be. Nor are they like her later novels. This article suggests that they are distinctive, self-conscious experiments in a different and hitherto little-regarded literary form: that of the sequence of separate but related short fictions, which seems to have been very popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Linked series of "sketches", "tales" and "papers" were produced by most major fiction writers of the period, and the form was used and reflected upon in varied and sophisticated ways. Such fictions were prominent both in contemporary periodicals, and also amongst the holdings of Keighley Mechanics' Institute Library, from which the Brontë family borrowed books. In her final tales of Angria, Charlotte Brontë is seen to be appropriating and developing this form, partly as a riposte to her brother Branwell's grand narratives of masculine authority, and partly for its expressive possibilities. Less the last of her juvenilia than the first of her adult fictions, these tales reveal her as already, in her early twenties, sharply aware of contemporary generic expectations and thinking self-reflexively about the nature of fictional art.

Her Sisters' Keeper: Charlotte Brontë's Defence of Emily and Anne, 23 – 48
Author: Susan R. Bauman
Abstract: Although Charlotte Brontë's treatment of her sisters' works has been criticized, her guardianship of their literary legacies reveals a complex approach to their reception. She deliberately promotes her sisters as poets in 1850 to rescue them from the notoriety surrounding the novels, reconstituting their battered reputations around their verse. In the prefaces to "Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell" and in annotations and changes to two poems which she describes misleadingly as their "Last Lines", Charlotte constructs a persuasive portrait of two women exemplary in life and death. She consciously distorts evidence for narrative effect so that her sisters' bad reputations, based on writing fiction, are recuperated through the fiction of biography to produce a shining representation based on the poetry; the poetry then receives editorial manipulation to support the fictionalized narrative. Charlotte's construction of her sisters' poetry was a strategic response to contemporary cultural and literary trends.

Dissolving Pearls: Charlotte Brontë's Textual Hieroglyphics, 49 – 69
Author: Siân B. Griffiths
Abstract: Critics have often pointed to the autobiographical moments in Villette to examine Charlotte Brontë's experiences with, and attitudes about, romantic and sexual love, yet few have explored how these autobiographical moments comment on nineteenth-century female authorship. The author argues that Brontë masks her "heretic narrative" by employing hieroglyphic scenes for her readers to decipher, a device she calls the reader's attention to through Lucy Snowe's and M. Paul's readings of the portraits of Cleopatra and the tableaux of "La vie d'une femme". As this notion of hieroglyphic text is expanded to the novel and the images Brontë sketches are read, a radical statement on the roles of women emerges. In particular, the author focuses on Brontë's recurring pearl imagery, which, combined with the Cleopatra portrait, recalls the legend of the pearl banquet shared by Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, and thus brings gender relationships into the forefront of the novel's discourse. Polly, the perfect wife, becomes a pearl dissolved in the wine of her marital union, while Lucy Snowe, author in training, survives to see her suitor drowned, consumed by the ocean just as the fabled pearl was consumed in Cleopatra's wine goblet. By cloaking her views within this alternative form of text, the hieroglyph, Brontë prevents her novel from being too openly heretical for her public's consumption while still allowing her to offer societal critique. At the same time, she explodes the notion of the novel as strictly a word-based text by literalizing Percy Bysshe Shelley's concept of poets writing in hieroglyphic language. By reading Brontë's images, the reader comes to understand Villette as a book concerning one writer's growth as well as the tactics women writers explored to discuss their most polemical views within the bounds of Victorian propriety.

The "Irish Concern" in Jane Eyre, 70 – 90
Author: Susan M. Kroeg

The Ghost and the Brownie: Scottish Influences on Emily Brontë, 91 – 116
Author: Monica Germanà
Abstract: This article examines the influence of Scottish folklore and fairy-belief in the writings of Emily Brontë. The two selected motifs of the supernatural, the ghost and the brownie, which cover a central role in James Hogg's The Shepherd's Calendar, underlie the plot and characterization of episodes from the Gondal saga and Wuthering Heights. The seamless continuity between the seen and the unseen, signified by ghostly apparitions, and the brownie's moral ambivalence featured in Hogg's tales throw new light on the psychological treatment of the supernatural in Brontë's works.

Speculations on Inheritance and Anne Brontës Legacy for the Victorian Custody Novel, 117 – 139
Author: Tamara S. Wagner

Book Reviews, 140 – 170

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