Brontë Studies. Volume 41, Issue 3

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 41, Issue 3, July 2016) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:       

Editorial
pp. 191-192 Author: Duckett, Robert

‘Such a life…’: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë
pp. 193-204 Author:  Stoneman, Patsy
Abstract:
stract
This paper documents the course of Charlotte Brontë’s friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell and the events leading to Gaskell’s undertaking of her remarkable biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). It goes on to suggest elements of Charlotte’s life, especially those reflected in her youthful writing, which Gaskell did not know or chose not to represent. Finally the paper considers the mutual impact the two women had on one another as writers whose novels closely succeeded one another during the same few years — Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Barton (1848), Shirley (1849), Cranford (1850), Ruth (1853), Villette (1853), North and South (1854–55) — and summarizes the differences between Gaskell’s predominantly optimistic outlook on life, in which women combine a caring role with increased independence, and Charlotte’s less hopeful perspective focusing on the plight of unmarried women.

Becoming a Stranger to Oneself: Estrangement and Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre
pp. 205-215  Author:  Pond, Kristen
Abstract:
This essay argues that the development of Jane’s story and the Bildungsroman form of the novel depend on something more than just Jane’s increasing narrative control; they actually depend on the disruption of Jane’s voice. The essay looks at key scenes, including Jane’s encounter with St John and the innkeeper, where these characters take up the role of narrator in telling Jane’s story. I refer to these moments in the novel as estrangement scenes to underscore the important distance that opens up between Jane and the reader. Because of the distance created from the estranging effect of hearing contrary versions of Jane’s story, the reader now chooses from among different perspectives in order to continue sympathizing with Jane, and that choice reflects the intellectual component of the sympathetic act. Not only do readers feel with Jane, they think along with her. Though other voices remain silenced in the text, most notably Bertha Mason’s, Charlotte Brontë does not let her novel succumb wholly to the deafening voice of a single storyteller. The novel is in fact quite self-conscious about the relationship among narrative voice, perspective and identification..

Reading Amazon Fragments: Queering Shirley
pp. 216-228  Author:  Berg, Temma
Abstract:
In this article, I investigate Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s most neglected novel, to focus on its subtle allusions to unexplored sexualities and to propose the possibility that Anne Lister and her relationship with Ann Walker influenced the construction of both the novel’s plot and the relationship of its two heroines. A Yorkshire lesbian landowner, Lister lived only 10 miles away from Haworth, and, from the autumn of 1838 to the spring of 1839, Emily Brontë taught in a school one mile away from Lister’s ancestral home. Most important, the novel is threaded with images which capture the threatening seductiveness of hidden and haunting women. Though the novel ends with both heroines securely married (identified only as ‘Mrs. Robert’ and ‘Mrs. Louis’) and with the Amazon threat of Shirley’s masculinity curbed, the power of Shirley’s peculiarities echoes in the conclusion’s recollection of a last sighting of a ‘fairish [fairy] in Fieldhead Hollow’.

Heathcliff’s Freedom in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 229-238 Author:  Tong, Xiaoyian
Abstract:
Freedom seems to be a fantasy for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights according to some critics. Yet, in the light of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical ideas on freedom, Heathcliff is always free and the whole novel delineates how a free man overcomes various obstacles through constant choices rather than how a man pursues freedom. This essay, employing Sartre’s relevant theory, will outline Heathcliff’s freedom, through which we might detect some hidden beauty of this controversial novel.

Clothes in Wuthering Heights
pp. 239-248 Author:  Tytler, Graeme
Abstract:
References to clothes in Wuthering Heights, though somewhat minimal, deserve our attention for some of the ways in which they enhance the realism of the narrative. Seldom making up a detailed personal description such as may be found in many a nineteenth-century novel, clothes here tend to play their part as individual items, with functions ranging from denoting social status to reinforcing, usually in the form of outdoor wear, the negative implications of certain actions or episodes. Nor without significance are the uses of clothes for purposes other than those for which they are specifically designed. Especially interesting, too, is Emily Brontë’s treatment of headgear for various structural or thematic or even humorous purposes.

Caged Eagles, Songsters and Carrion-Seekers: Birds in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
pp. 249-260 Author:  Roberson Wallace, Emily
Abstract:
Recent essays in animal studies attempt to dismiss the significance of animal symbolism in works of literature such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, arguing that animals should be seen for themselves rather than only as symbols or otherwise used to illustrate distinctive features of human characters. This approach turns a literary device into a mode of scientific exploration; it presupposes that the achievements of traditional studies of animal symbolism have included answering the questions of why nineteenth-century British authors frequently used animals as symbols in their novels, and why they consistently and deliberately associated certain characters with them. One animal crucial to the history of both literature and animal studies is the bird, and those two questions have remained unanswered, as scholars have limited their observations to the birds as if the novelists’ associations between birds and characters did not exist. A deeper understanding of representations of birds in two of the period’s most famous novels illuminates both their characters and the era’s fascination with ornithology itself.

A Brontë Reading List: Part 7
pp. 158-165 Author:  Ogden, James
Abstract:
This list is part of an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work. The earlier parts were published in Brontë Studies, 32.2 (July 2007), 33.3 (November 2008), 34.3 (November 2009), 36.4 (November 2011), 37.3 (September 2012) and 39.1 (January 2014). The present part covers work mostly published between 2010 and 2014.

Reviews
Nelly Dean
pp. 273-274 Author:  Jenkins, Penelope

The Lost Child
pp. 274-275 Author:  Stoneman, Patsy

Dickens and the Imagined Child
pp. 275-277 Author: Cubie Henck, Karen C.

Principle and Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman
p. 279-280 Author: Duckett,Bob