Brontë Studies. Volume 42. Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 42, Issue 1, January 2017) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:       

Editorial
pp. 1-2 Author: Amber A. Adams & Josephine Smith

‘Fairly Committed to Black and White’: The Power of Documentation in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
pp. 3-14 Author:  Grace, Andrew
Abstract:
This paper argues that Jane Eyre’s struggle to develop epistemological authority in her own life is shaped by three key documents — a letter from her uncle, Richard Mason’s testimony, and her own signature — which are presented to her at climactic moments in her journey. The documents, in turn, present sites upon which Jane can confront the lasting influence of the past over her life and identity. In this regard, the documents are ‘Gothicized’, and interpreting their roles in the novel presents an opportunity for exploring how characters in the present, especially Jane, can create productive knowledge that gives them power over their own lives. Furthermore, by drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theories about the image, this paper argues that readers experience the aforementioned documents in unique ways that enable them to make connections between Charlotte Brontë’s novel and other forms of discourse, most notably legal discourse.

The Influence of Villette on Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs
pp. 15-25 Author:  Newman, Hilary
Abstract:
his article will suggest that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette was a major influence on Dorothy Richardson’s modernist novel-sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67). Richardson’s first chapter-novel in Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, will be focused on. Different aspects of the influence of Villette on Pointed Roofs will be examined, from more general aspects of events and echoes to technical aspects such as narrative techniques, imagery and punctuation. The modernist nature of Pilgrimage has often been stressed; but this article will stress that Richardson, along with other women novelists also, as Virginia Woolf expresses it, ‘think back through their mothers’. It will also emerge that if Pointed Roofs looked back, in many ways Villette anticipated modernism.

The Presentation of the Second Catherine in Wuthering Heights
pp. 26-36  Author:  Tytler, Graeme
Abstract:
Throughout Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë distinguishes between Jane Eyre as a first-person narrator who lends her voice to the narrative, and Jane’s remembered self, whose actions, thoughts and feelings are the narrative focus. Although Charlotte Brontë’s distinction between these two Janes affects the narrative structure and representation of character throughout the novel, in Chapter 23 Charlotte Brontë exploits the knowledge gap between her narrator-Jane and the remembered self. Examining Charlotte Brontë’s manipulation of this gap, this paper considers Charlotte Brontë’s deliberate development of a dubious narrative authority and its implications for the interpretation of the novel.

Inhabiting Nature in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 37-47 Author:  Defant, Ivonne
Abstract:
While the letters of Charlotte Brontë are a major source for our knowledge of the events and personalities in the Brontë story, it is worthwhile to look at them as one her achievements in authorship and what they reveal of her character. Compared to her contemporaries, her letters exhibit a stiffness and heaviness of style, probably due to the nature of her early reading and lack of social intercourse. As she grew older her style lightened, but she never lost her fervour, a feature that make her letters so interesting. Being a shy person, Charlotte enjoyed writing letters and revealed more of herself in them than she did in company. She was a good observer of human nature and a shrewd commentator on life. She wrote with certainty and assurance on matters right and wrong, and could be censorious and didactic, yet at times showed great understanding. She had a spartan self-repressive attitude to life; of submission to fate, fortitude, control of excessive feeling, and a sacrifice of self-interest. But this was not how she saw herself and is in contrast to her novels where there is more passion and intensity of experience. Charlotte was uncomfortable with dealing with public questions and came to recognize her limited experience, evidenced in the change of tone from Shirley to Villette. The appeal of her letters is in her openness, her truthfulness and in her personal feelings.

The Myth of Anne Brontë
pp. 48-59 Author:  Han, Catherine Paula
Abstract:
Anne Brontë may be less famous than her sisters, but contemporary popular culture still makes many knowing allusions to the writer. This article delineates the origins and development of some of the key motifs in representations of Anne Brontë’s life, death and literary imagination. Investigating the reasons for this writer's continuous marginalization, this examination also explores the ways in which the critical discourse parallels the writer’s re-emergence in popular culture as a feminist figure.

Miles Away: Miss Miles, a Female Bildungsroman by a ‘Friend of Charlotte Brontë’
pp. 60-73 Author: Rudig, Stefanie
Abstract:
Mary Taylor’s work is often reduced to a footnote in Brontë studies and her only novel, Miss Miles, tends to be compared unfavourably to the more sophisticated literary output of her illustrious friend. But Taylor was not just one of Charlotte Brontë’s closest friends. She was also a lifelong advocate of women’s rights and female self-reliance — one who lived by her own convictions. In the middle of the nineteenth century, colonial New Zealand provided the space to perfect her philosophy of female autonomy. Taylor succeeded, unconventionally, as a successful businesswoman before she returned to England in 1859. Surprisingly, there is not a single clue in Miss Miles that its author wrote the major part of it in New Zealand. This article studies Taylor’s novel as a female Bildungsroman, expressive of the author’s self-formation in New Zealand, and focuses on the role of female friendship as reflected upon in the novel.

What Jane Austen Might Have Said About the Brontës … in a Letter
pp. 74-75 Author:  De Leo, Maddalena
Abstract:
This is a revision of a letter I sent to the Jane Austen Society of Buenos Aires in 2005 which won a very honourable mention and a prize. It appears here as a response to the Guest Editor’s invitation on p. 198 of Brontë Studies, 41.2 (April 2016), at the end of Patrick Dudgeon’s paper ‘What Jane Austen Might Have Said’, proposing that readers take on Jane’s role and write her response to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Reviews

Victorian Aesthetics of Erasure in Fiction and Illustration
pp. 76-77 Author:  Cubie Henck, Karen C.

The Brontë Plot
pp. 77-78 Author:  Duckett, Bob

The Madwoman Upstairs
pp. 78-80 Author: Mullis, Aileen

Yuki Chan in Brontë Country
p. 80-82 Author: Duckett, Bob

Mary Anne
p. 82 Author: Powell. Sarah

Mutable Passions: Charlotte Brontë: A Disquieting Affair
p. 83 Author: Powell, Sarah

Thornfield Hall
p. 84-85 Author: Duckett, Bob

In Search of Anne Brontë
p. 85-88 Author: Powell. Sarah