Brontë Studies. Volume 36, Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2011) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Men in the Brontës' Lives: Influences, Publishers, Critics, and Characters

Editorial
pp. iii-iv(2) Author: Lonoff, Sue

Charlotte Brontë, Autobiography, and the Image of the Hero

pp. 1-19(19) Author: Alexander, Christine
Abstract:
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was one of the many real-life heroes, probably the pre-eminent one, in Charlotte Brontë's life and works. He was a masculine type that attracted her, as both woman and writer, from a very early age; but she was not alone in her admiration of what Carlyle called 'the great ones of the earth'. The paper argues that Charlotte's response to historical characters like the Duke of Wellington is not only part of a cultural dynamic of hero-worship that provided a ready context for 'veneration' but is also part of the complex self-fashioning that we all experience in the process of identity formation. Wellington and his various mutations can be traced in her writing from the juvenilia to Shirley in particular, and can be seen as an evolving critique on the hero. They also reflect an important element of Charlotte Brontë's personal narrative and indicate the way hero-worship helped to mould her ambition, her love of politics and her idea of integrity.

The Influence of Patrick Brontë on His Children
pp. 20-27(8) Author: Green, Dudley
Abstract:
A study of the life of the Reverend Patrick Brontë reveals him as a loving father, deeply interested in the welfare of his children. After his wife's death he did all he could to provide them with a stable and happy home life. Most obviously this is seen in the schooling which he ensured they received. Despite the tragedy at the Clergy Daughters' School, he persisted in his efforts, sending Charlotte and her sisters to Roe Head School and educating Branwell at home. He imparted to them his knowledge of the Bible and his great interest in art. He also enabled them to share his love of music, buying a piano for the parsonage and paying for their music lessons. He shared with them a passionate interest in politics, encouraging them to think independently for themselves on the great issues of the day. Unusually, he also taught Emily to shoot. He imbued his daughter Charlotte with an unremitting ambition for them to make the most of their lives, and he accompanied Charlotte and Emily to Brussels. The Bishop of Ripon recognized Mr Brontë's intellectual qualities and his influence on his children, as did Monsieur Heger.

The Three Faces of Constantin Heger
pp. 28-37(10) Author: Lonoff, Sue
Abstract:
To gain insight into the influence of Constantin Heger on Charlotte Brontë, it is useful to consider three aspects of his identity. First, there is the man who lived and died in Brussels, insofar as biographical sources can disclose him. Second, there is the professor who profoundly affected Charlotte. A consideration of his teaching methods and excerpts from two of her Belgian essays shed light on the growth of her attachment to him. Third, there is the person and the professor she reconstructed as Villette's Paul Emanuel. The essay also considers Madame Heger's effect on the dynamic between master and student.

Sex and the Woman Writer: Charlotte Brontë and the Cautionary Tale of Letitia Elizabeth Landon
pp. 38-43(6) Author: Miller, Lucasta
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë's relationships with men, and her fictional portrayal of romantic love, have often been seen as controversial. Her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell erased Brontë's unrequited passion for Constantin Heger from her life story, and downplayed the erotic aspects of her work, in an effort to absolve her from the accusations of coarseness and immorality which had greeted her novels. This article explains the controversy over Brontë's treatment of women's passion by comparing her with her precursor, the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who also explored love in a subjective female voice, and was read by the Brontës in their youth. Having shot to fame in the 1820s, Landon subsequently became associated with sexual scandal, the fallout from which continued after her death in 1838 and impacted on what was deemed acceptable in women's writing.

Branwell Brontë's Family Portraits: Motives, Influences, and Legacy
pp. 44-56(13) Author: Sellars, Jane
Abstract:
This essay explores the contemporary perception of Branwell Brontë's portraits of his literary sisters. It examines his motivation for portraying his sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne as members of a leisured social class to which in reality they did not belong. Through an examination of the influence of British portrait painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Lawrence, Reynolds and Romney, I analyse the pictorial structure of Branwell's famous portraits. I also consider the physical nature of the works themselves, and offer a theory as to why we regard the paintings as icons, in the truest sense of the word.


'Visions Rise, and Change': Emily Brontë's Poetry and Male Romantic Poetry
pp. 57-63(7)  Author: O'Neill, Michael
Abstract:
Harold Bloom once wrote that 'Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem'.1 His phrasing is poetic in its suggestiveness: the 'knowing' concedes or affirms itself to be an 'art', and rhymes itself with the 'hidden roads that go', as though the critic's effort should be put into tracing secrets 'hidden' along what are, at the same time, 'roads'. This essay will seek to walk down 'roads' leading from the work of the male Roman tic poets into the imaginative hiding-places of that strangest and most haunting of literary oeuvres, the poetry of Emily Brontë. It will do so in the light of the conviction that the originality of Brontë's individual talent emerges most clearly when set in relief against the major tradition — male Romantic poetry — that made it possible.

Anne Brontë — Not the Least of Shakespeare's Sisters
pp. 64-74(11)  Author: Edmondson, Paul
Abstract:
This essay explores the influence of Shakespeare on Anne Brontë, and follows on from my earlier study in Shakespeare Survey 62 (see below for a full bibliographical reference). It seems clear that Anne read more Shakespeare between her work on Agnes Grey and her writing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the particular focus here. I identify two kinds of literary allusion, the 'unambiguous' and the 'submerged', and collate all nineteen references to Shakespeare in Anne's two novels made available through the major critical editions (see Table 1). To these I add nineteen more and present them through reference to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies and sonnets. I conclude by making the case that Shakespeare was important to Anne in her final lines of poetry, and in Charlotte's own later appropriation of them.

George Smith, Prince of Publishers, and William Smith Williams
pp. 75-84(10) Author: Smith, Margaret
Abstract:
The first part of this essay describes the background of George Smith, his meeting with Charlotte and Anne Brontë, and the connections that developed between him and Charlotte. Smith's kindness and shrewd financial advice to the sisters are recorded, as are the nature of his feelings toward her; aspects of his career; his generosity to writers and artists; his happy marriage; his founding of the Cornhill Magazine; and his creation of the Dictionary of National Biography. The second part describes William Smith Williams's background and his engagement as reader to the firm of Smith, Elder, and Company. It was his refusal of The Professor, and his advice that a three-volume novel would be welcomed, that led to the publication of Jane Eyre. Charlotte's first meeting with Williams, her appreciation of his kindness, his sensitive response to the death of Emily Brontë and the illness of Anne Brontë, and Charlotte's eventual withdrawal from his kind attentions are also considered through references to their correspondence.

Charlotte Brontë and William Thackeray
pp. 85-94(10) Author: Mullen, Richard
Abstract:
Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair were published in 1847 and both authors had a high regard for the other's achievement. They met a few times after this but each meeting was unsatisfactory as Thackeray never equalled the expectations that Charlotte Brontë had formed about this 'Titan of Mind'. She thought him 'prophet like' and 'the first social regenerator of the day', but her dedication of the second edition of Jane Eyre to him set off gossip in literary circles that she was his mistress. He was uncomfortable with her belief that he had a special 'mission' as a writer. Their somewhat farcical encounters throw light upon their personalities and work and upon the difficulties of a shy provincial woman being thrust into the sophisticated London literary world.

'God Deliver Me from my Friends!' Charlotte Brontë and G. H. Lewes
pp. 95-103(9) Author: Bailin, Miriam
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë wrote nine letters to George Henry Lewes, prominent man of letters and future companion of George Eliot. Though none of his letters to her survive, he demonstrably provoked in her a lively defence of her creative method. Her responses to his comments on her work and to his principles of literary realism provide a particularly revealing insight into her own critical principles as well as her sense of herself as an artist.

The Real Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte Brontë's Husband
pp. 104-110(7)  Author: Cochrane, Margaret; Cochrane, Robert
Abstract:
Arthur Bell Nicholls progressed from curate to being Charlotte's 'dear boy'. He was at Haworth when first Branwell and then Emily and Anne died, leaving Charlotte the sole survivor. It was inevitable they should become closer. Arthur's proposal was initially rejected by Patrick but later accepted only for Charlotte to die a mere nine months after marriage. As he had promised Charlotte, Arthur stayed to look after Mr Brontë until the old man's death. Being unsuccessful in obtaining the Haworth living he returned home to Ireland, where he managed his aunt's smallholding. He was assiduous in protecting Charlotte's good name and, although he lived for a further fifty years, never forgot her. Nine years after Charlotte's death he married again but when he died it was with Charlotte's name on his lips.

Rochester and Heathcliff as Romantic Heroes
pp. 111-118(8)  Author: Stoneman, Patsy
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë's Mr Rochester and Emily's Heathcliff are often spoken of as models of the Romantic hero, but this paper argues that they are in fact models of very different kinds. While both characters draw some characteristics from the moody heroes of Byron, Rochester is still conceived as a potential husband for Jane in a novel which, though unorthodox in many ways, still has a conventional courtship-and-marriage structure ending in a modified happy-ever-after. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, on the other hand, follows the many intense brother-sister relationships found in the Romantic poetry of Byron and Shelley, and is inevitably tragic since it cannot be consummated except in nostalgia for childhood or anticipation of death. Freudian and post-Freudian theory is used to argue that Jane Eyre follows the pattern which Freud defined as 'normal' femininity, marrying a father-like figure, while both Catherine and Heathcliff are frustrated by the other's assertion of independent desires instead of continuing to be the mirroring 'other self' of childhood.

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