The Accents of Persuasion

Faber & Faber has republished the 1966 scholar classic The Accents of Persuasion: The Charlotte Brontë novels by Robert Bernard Martin:

The Accents of Persuasion
Charlotte Bronte's Novels
Robert Bernard
ISBN: 9780571296477
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber / Faber Finds
March 2013

First published in 1966, Robert Bernard Martin's The Accents of Persuasion is a consummate critical study of Charlotte Brontë's four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.

'The bare facts are so literally improbable as to tease one into considering the lives of the Brontës themselves as some wild metaphorical statement of the Romantic conception of the world ... Even the best of biography, however, may tend to serve history rather than literature, and one may be forgiven for wishing to return from their lives to the works of the sisters Brontë ... The following study, then, is an attempt to search out the themes that occupied [Charlotte] Brontë in her novels and to demonstrate how they are given artistic life; in short, to show how Charlotte Brontë attempted to speak 'the language of conviction' in the 'accents of persuasion'.'
(Robert Bernard Martin, from his Introduction.)