Companion and Gender

Recent books with Brontë-related essays:

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
Edited by Adrian Poole
University of Cambridge
ISBN-13: 9780521691574
Published January 2010

In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.

The Brontë chapters are:

10. Charlotte Brontë by Patsy Stoneman.
11. Emily Brontë by Heather Glen.

The Telegraph's reviews mentions the Brontë sections:

As well as those figures Leavis confidently declared to be the pre-eminent English novelists – Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad, with special mentions for Dickens and Lawrence – Poole has asked various academics to write essays on many others, including Sterne, Burney, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë and Stevenson – all disapproved of by Leavis. (...)
Patsy Stoneman reduces the gothic strangeness of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to a lesson in gender equality.

Gender and Victorian Reform
Editor: Anita Rose
Cambridge Scholar Publishings
Date Of Publication: Dec 2008
Isbn 13: 978-1-4438-0067-9
Isbn: 1-4438-0067-8

Gender, in the nineteenth century as now, is an integral part of identity. As a result, gender, along with race and class, has long been a vital part of public discourse about social concerns and reform. The fourteen essays in Gender and Victorian Reform address the overt and subtle ways in which gender influenced social reform in Victorian England. In addition to investigating the more readily apparent instances of gender in the areas of suffrage, women's education, and marriage law reform, the contributors to this collection examine the structure of charitable organizations, the interpretation of language and literacy, ideas of beauty, and religion through the lens of gender and offer diverse approaches to Victorian literature and culture. Some examine specific texts or single canonical authors, others introduce the reader to little-known authors and texts, and still others focus on the culture of reform rather than specific literary texts.
Essays are arranged into four parts, with Part I focusing on historical context and a revisioning of the historical romance. Part II addresses more specifically the role of women in public life and in the professions. The essays in Part III look even more specificallyat the connections among reform, gender, literacy and literary genre in Eliot, Collins, and Gaskell. The final four essays offer readings of the impact of gender ideology on beauty, dress, politics and religion.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection present a serious consideration of the role of gender in art and in public life that spans the Victorian era. Reformist impulses are revealed in a number of Victorian texts that are not generally read as overtly political. In this way, this collection thoughtfully focuses on the influence of gender on a wide range of social movements, and moves the significance of gender beyond simply the content of Victorian fiction and the identity of the authors and into the more fundamental connection of discourse to reform."

The Brontë essays are:

Chapter Eight: Reading the Institution: Charlotte Brontë’s Visual Literacy and Sites/Sights of Resistance in Shirley by Eric G. Lorentzen
Chapter Eleven: Reforming Beauty in Brontë’s Shirley by Margaret E. Mitchell

A review of the book can be found on Brontë Studies (Volume 35, Issue 1 (March 2010), pp 89)

Categories: Books, Scholar