Victorian Sensation Fiction and Servants

Two new scholar publications with Brontë content:

From Wollstonecraft to Stoker
Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction
Edited by Marilyn Brock

ISBN 978-0-7864-4021-4
notes, bibliographies, index
220pp. softcover 2009

This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Brontë. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.

The Brontë essay is “Portrait of a governess, disconnected, poor, and plain”: Staging the Spectral Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas.

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy
Jean Fernandez

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
ISBN: 9780415804387
ISBN-10: 0415804388
Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: 09/03/2009
Pages: 218

In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

The Brontë chapter has the title Oral Pleasures: Repression and Desire in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Elizabeth Gaskell's The Old Nurse's Story (1862).

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian Era