Brontë Studies. Volume 43, Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 43 Issue 1, January 2018) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

The 2016 Brontë Society Conference, 19–21 August 2016: ‘… the business of a woman’s life …’: Charlotte Brontë and the Woman Question Opening/Closing Remarks
pp. 1-3 Author: Stoneman, Patsy

Keynote: How the Child Bride Vanquished the Savage Father: Jane Eyre and Wish Fulfilment
pp. 4-13 Author: Greer, Germaine

Early Ambitions: Charlotte Brontë, Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey
pp. 14-31 Author: Alexander, Christine
Abstract: 
This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s early ambition to enter what was still essentially a male world of authorship. Although there is evidence that for several years she intended to be a visual artist, the essay suggests that from the age of fourteen Charlotte Brontë was conscious of the possibility of a writing career, despite the fact that she was a young woman and famously discouraged by Robert Southey. This can be seen in an examination of her literary models, in the pseudonyms she adopted and in her experimentation with various genres. In particular, this essay focuses on the stimulus provided by the memory of her mother, Maria Branwell Brontë, and her newly discovered copy of The Remains of Henry Kirke White (1810), a volume of youthful poetry containing Brontë family annotations and two tipped-in manuscripts by Charlotte. The book is significant not only for its associations with both her parents (the Reverend Patrick Brontë knew Henry Kirke White at Cambridge) and the inserted unpublished manuscripts, but also for its association with a tradition of successful juvenilia inspired by the Romantic poets and encouraged by Robert Southey, Poet Laureate and editor of the Kirke White poems, cogent reasons why Charlotte Brontë should write to Southey for advice on a literary career.

‘Their Name Was Brontë’: Brontë Biography on Screen
pp. 32-40 Author: Jansson, Siv
Abstract: 
Biography, whether written, aural, oral or visual, is profoundly affected by its cultural moment; while the story told may have the same broad basis, its form and emphasis will be shaped by the historic, intellectual and commercial demands on the biographer. This is even more the case with biographies on screen, where the need to attract a non-specialist audience is even greater. Prior to the broadcast of To Walk Invisible in 2016, the Brontës had been the subject of three major film/television biographical dramas, all of which took very different approaches and all of which were clearly shaped by their cultural and historical circumstances. This paper explores the ways in which each of these three narratives was brought to the screen, and some of the difficulties screen biographers face.

The Many Faces of Jane Eyre: Film Cultures and the Frontiers of Feminist Representation
pp. 41-54 Author: Fanning, Sarah E.
Abstract:
This article provides an analysis of screen adaptations based on Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847). Looking at different cultures of feminism in the 1940s, 1980s and 2000s, it examines how the character of Jane has been diversely portrayed at times when gender norms were being rigorously challenged in the culture. The adaptations’ engagement with Brontë’s implicit feminism is examined in the context of each period’s prevailing feminist ideologies as well as in the practices employed by the film and television industries.

‘Papa has now me only’: Charlotte Brontë and the Houses of Unwed Daughters and Widowed Fathers
pp. 55-60 Author: Williams, Heather
Abstract: 
By examining Charlotte Brontë’s domestic responsibilities in her West Yorkshire home after the deaths of her siblings, this essay considers the relationship of unwed daughters and widowed fathers in real life and nineteenth-century fiction. Early biographical depictions, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, tend to present Brontë during these years as an angel-in-the-house literary figure, sacrificing her independence as an intellectual and writer in order to care for her ageing father and maintain the domestic sphere of the parsonage. This essay attempts to reconcile this romanticized, and perhaps mythologized, depiction of Brontë with a more realistic vision of her productive literary life.

The Business of Coquetting
pp. 61-70 Author: Berg, Temma
Abstract:
The eighteenth century deplored the coquette. Mary Wollstonecraft, a stern critic of flirting, argued that getting a husband should not be the business of a woman’s life. In their evening meetings, it is likely that the Brontë sisters read and discussed Wollstonecraft. Certainly, her ideas can be found in their novels. Sometimes they agreed with their forerunner, sometimes they challenged her. In my essay I look at a few moments in Charlotte Brontë’s writings where she considers the guilty pleasures of coquetting. I begin with Jane and Rochester and end with a glimpse at Charlotte’s fascination with William Weightman. Did the flirting of this otherwise admirable cleric serve as the contradiction that enabled her to value coquetting? In her letters and presumably also in her life and certainly in her novels, Charlotte coquettes. A process of revealing and concealing, of opening and closing off possibilities, of piquing interest and toying with expectations, writing a novel is, after all, not unlike coquetting. It could be argued that for Charlotte Brontë not only was literature a woman’s (and a man’s) business but so was coquetting.

RETRACTED: Female Education as a Theme in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë
pp. 71-77 Author: Mills,Margaret
Abstract:
In her novels, Charlotte Brontë challenges the experiences of women in education, class, marriage and employment. It is not surprising that female education had a prominent part to play in her novels: two of them have their main setting within a school, and the protagonist is employed as teacher, governess or tutor. Although Charlotte’s preoccupation with teaching as a career and with the means by which a woman could achieve that role reflects her own life experience, it is incorrect to assume that she wrote about these matters simply because this was familiar territory for her. Education, and particularly the education of women, was an issue of growing importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My paper outlines some significant educational issues at the time Charlotte was writing — the function of teaching and learning and the curricula content for male and female education — and considers the connection in her novels between education and power imbalance between the sexes.

Implementing Feminist Economics for the Study of Literature: The Economic Dimensions of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley Revisited
pp. 78-88 Author: Rostek, Joanna
Abstract:
This article analyses the economic dimensions of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) through an approach inspired by feminist economics. In addition to addressing how Charlotte Brontë explores the connections between the economy, marriage and love, the feminist economic interpretation reveals her ambivalent attitude towards the sexual division of labour and women’s domestic work. Besides shedding light on hitherto overlooked economic aspects of Shirley, this article argues that numerous economic analyses of literature are unwittingly premised on an androcentric conception of the economy which obscures women’s contributions to both the economy and economic writing. The article promotes the implementation of feminist economics for the study of literature as a means of arriving at more accurate and gender balanced economic readings of texts.

Charlotte Brontë and the Politics of Cloth: The ‘vile rumbling mills’ of Yorkshire
pp. 89-99 Author: Wynne, Deborah
Abstract:
This essay examines Charlotte Brontë’s engagement with the textile industry from her earliest writings to her 1849 Condition of England novel Shirley in order to emphasize the role that Yorkshire and its staple industry played in her writing. Critics have discussed her interest in textile production largely in relation to Shirley. However, her fascination with cloth manufacturing is evident in many of her Angrian tales and some of her unfinished novels. This essay argues that through her early representations of mills and mill owners she formulated an understanding of political conflict and masculine power which helped to shape her mature writing. This culminates in Shirley with her critique of the taboo against educated women entering careers in trade and manufacturing.

The Business of Coquetting
pp. 61-70 Author: Berg, Temma
Abstract:
The eighteenth century deplored the coquette. Mary Wollstonecraft, a stern critic of flirting, argued that getting a husband should not be the business of a woman’s life. In their evening meetings, it is likely that the Brontë sisters read and discussed Wollstonecraft. Certainly, her ideas can be found in their novels. Sometimes they agreed with their forerunner, sometimes they challenged her. In my essay I look at a few moments in Charlotte Brontë’s writings where she considers the guilty pleasures of coquetting. I begin with Jane and Rochester and end with a glimpse at Charlotte’s fascination with William Weightman. Did the flirting of this otherwise admirable cleric serve as the contradiction that enabled her to value coquetting? In her letters and presumably also in her life and certainly in her novels, Charlotte coquettes. A process of revealing and concealing, of opening and closing off possibilities, of piquing interest and toying with expectations, writing a novel is, after all, not unlike coquetting. It could be argued that for Charlotte Brontë not only was literature a woman’s (and a man’s) business but so was coquetting.

Corrigendum
Branwell Brontë’s Alexander Rougue/Percy. Part 2
pp. 100 Author: Neufeldt, Victor