Brontë Studies. Volume 40, Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 40, Issue 1, January 2015) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. iii-iv Author: Adams, Amber M.

Was Emily Brontë an Amateur Geometer?
pp. 1-10    Author:  Cooper, Christopher
Abstract:
M. Heger claimed that Emily had a masculine mind, meaning that she had a well-developed capacity for logical thinking. To assist her drawing skills she worked through a drawing manual that was strongly based on Euclidean geometry. The Brontë Parsonage Library holds a manuscript of her drawings in which she practised several methods for constructing ellipses. Here we identify the drawing manual from which she worked and describe the geometry that lies behind the several ‘problems’.

Facets of Time Consciousness in Wuthering Heights
pp. 11-21    Author:  Tytler, Graeme
Abstract:
One topic that deserves critical attention is the treatment of time consciousness in Wuthering Heights. Time consciousness is manifest, for example, in references suggesting the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious mind, as it is in the contradictions shown to exist between the formal meaning of some temporal adverbs and the anomalous interpretations to which they are subjected in certain emotional utterances. Time consciousness also plays an important part in characterization, most notably in the presentation of Nelly Dean and Heathcliff. Certainly it is through their respective attitudes to time, especially clock time, that they, no less than some of the other characters, tell us a good deal about themselves. It is noteworthy, too, that among a quite extraordinary number of references to time in the novel we may come across some occurring in negative contexts often enough to induce us to surmise that time itself is for Emily Brontë something of a metaphysical problem.

Shirley as Elegy
pp. 22-33      Author: Stoneman, Patsy
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley has never been a popular novel, partly because it seems to lack focus, shifting between a general concern with the condition of England and the particular situation of its unmarried women. The fact that all three of Charlotte’s remaining siblings died during its composition has been cited only as mitigating its evident faults. This essay, however, takes seriously Charlotte’s puzzling declaration that the character of Shirley was her effort ‘to depict [...] what Emily Brontë would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity’, arguing that aspects of the novel can be read in terms of traditional elegy. With reference to Freud’s essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Derrida’s book, The Work of Mourning, the essay concludes that Charlotte’s effort at elegizing her sister is most successful not in the passages describing Shirley’s near-apotheosis, but in the novel’s pervasively elegiac descriptions of the natural world.

Jane Eyre’s Stage Presence
pp. 34-43   Author:  Ellis Holm, Lauren
Abstract:
This essay looks at John Courtney’s Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor (1848) to bring into focus Charlotte Brontë’s negotiation of embodiment and disembodiment, popularity and privacy, social engagement and personal refuge. The play’s explicit political message provides evidence of the social critique contemporary readers found in Charlotte’s novel while delineating the limitations of her commitment to that commentary. In its presentation of Jane Eyre on stage, Courtney’s play makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, the relationship between the novel and theatre in the Victorian period, and the nature of novelistic theatricality.

‘Don’t forget this is how I earn my living’: Internal Focalization, Subjectivity and the Victorian Woman Artist in the Adaptation of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC Miniseries, 1996)
pp. 44-58  Author:  Pérez Ríu, Carmen
Abstract:
This article is an analysis of the TV adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which focuses on how the audio-visual language is used to convey the story through the perspective of the protagonist(s). One essential aspect of the discussion is the way focalization is achieved in both media, and in particular, how Helen Graham’s circumstances as a professional woman artist are a key feature of her characterization. Therefore, the analysis also brings in contextual information about Victorian women artists in history and in literature, as well as some details concerning the Brontës’ own artistic practice. In the course of the article some of the programme’s more relevant characteristics are shown to be a consequence of its status as a revisiting/revision of the original work from a present-day perspective and within the cinematic trend of post-heritage film.

The Bell Pseudonyms: a Brontë Connection?
pp. 59-64  Author:  Whitehead, Stephen
Abstract:
It is not conclusively known what or who inspired the Brontë sisters to choose the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Over the years, a number of Brontë scholars have speculated about the source of the pseudonyms and those speculations are reviewed here in order to provide the context for a new speculation. During the military campaign that won Lord Nelson his Dukedom of Bronte, two of the most prominent British players in the action were Ellis Cornelia Knight and Sir John Acton and this paper speculates that the intimacy of an Ellis and an Acton with the creation of the Brontë surname, might have inspired those two pseudonyms. The paper also considers the source of Charlotte’s pseudonym and argues against the automatic association with Frances Mary Richardson-Currer.

Brontë Society Creative Competition 2014: Three Winners
pp. 65-65  Author:  Fermi, Sarah

May the Bell be Rung for Harriet
pp. 66-69  Author:  Rosenberg, Tracy S.

A Dirty, Black-haired Child
pp. 70-71  Author:  Pacitti, Diane

Illustration of Jane Eyre’s Arrival at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre, Chapter Eleven
pp. 72-74  Author:  McNaney, Nicki

Reviews
pp. 75-84