Furious Lovemaking and Narrating Loss

The new book by Sandra M. Gilbert (co-author of the scholar classic The Madwoman in the Attic) also contains a chapter devoted to Jane Eyre:

Rereading Women
Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions
Sandra M. Gilbert (Author, University of California, Davis)
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Hardcover
May 2011
ISBN 978-0-393-06764-4
6.5 × 9.5 in / 380 pages

A collection of essays that reexamine literature through a feminist gaze from "one of our most versatile and gifted writers" (Joyce Carol Oates).

"We think back through our mothers if we are women," wrote Virginia Woolf. In this groundbreaking series of essays, Sandra M. Gilbert explores how our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life. She considers the effects of these literary mothers by examining her own history and the work of such luminaries as Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. In the course of the book, she charts her own development as a feminist, demonstrates ways of understanding the dynamics of gender and genre, and traces the redefinitions of maternity reflected in texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot.
Throughout, Gilbert asks major questions about feminism in the twentieth century: Why and how did its ideas become so necessary to women in the sixties and seventies? What have those feminist concepts come to mean in the new century? And above all, how have our intellectual mothers shaped our thoughts today?

Including:

Part II: Reading and Re-Reading Women’s Writing
4. Jane Eyre and the Secrets of Furious Lovemaking

The English Literary History (ELH) journal also publishes a Brontë paper in its Spring issue:

ELH - Volume 78, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 189-212
Gretchen Braun
"A Great Break in the Common Course of Confession": Narrating Loss in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

Abstract:

This essay suggests that a complex understanding of trauma can significantly explain both the narrative structure and the subject matter of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. The narrative structures attendant on traumatic experience provide a model for understanding Lucy Snowe's silences, repetitions, and evasions in a way that moves past the longstanding critical dichotomy that casts them as either an indication of oppression or a strategy for empowerment and instead explores how they both represent and enact a model of communication that seeks to render accessible experiences and perspectives generally marginalized in both Brontë's contemporary culture and the traditional realist novel.

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