Autist Jane or Huntingdon vs Huntingdon

A couple of new Brontë scholar papers recently published:

“On the Spectrum”: Rereading Contact and Affect in Jane Eyre
By Julia Miele Rodas, Bronx Community College, City University of New York
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue 4.2 (Summer 2008)

This essay suggests, however, that a new approach to Jane Eyre’s sociality enables a reading of the heroine as an individual on the autistic spectrum, and that such an interpretation, in turn, invites crucial new questions about the narrative of Jane Eyre and its apparent politics.

EDIT (April, 22): An interesting discussion thread about this paper can be read on the Wrong Planet Forum.

The Case of Helen Huntingdon
Ian Ward, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Criticism - Volume 49, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 151-182

Of course it never happened: Huntingdon v. Huntingdon. There was no "case" of Helen Huntingdon, at least not in formal juristic terms. That is the issue. Helen Huntingdon was unhappily married, subject to various forms of spousal abuse. But the law offered no respite. Instead, it left her with a choice: put up with it, or run away. It was not an uncommon dilemma in mid-nineteenth-century England. It was, however, an uncommon subject for public discourse, and it was an even more uncommon subject for literary commentary. Nevertheless, it was the subject of Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And the furtive tenant, who was hiding from her husband and from the law, was Helen Huntingdon. As we shall see, on its publication in 1848 the Tenant scandalized Victorian England, and its rather shadowy status in the nineteenth-century canon can perhaps be ascribed to this initial response.

Categories: Journals, Scholar