Brontë Studies. Volume 43. Issue 2

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 43 Issue 2, March 2018) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. 101-102 Author: Amber A. Adams & Josephine Smith

Charlotte Brontë’s Suitors Before Arthur Bell Nicholls
pp. 103-113 Author: Newman, Hilary
Abstract:
This article looks at the three men who proposed marriage to Charlotte Brontë, Henry Nussey, David Price and James Taylor, before the fourth successful suitor, Arthur Bell Nicholls. I have had a fresh look at the Diaries and Memoranda: Revd H. Nussey: 1830–1839, in an attempt to discover what he and Charlotte may have had in common. There is little information about Charlotte’s second suitor, David Price, but her tortuous involvement with her third suitor, James Taylor, can be followed throughout her correspondence. Her attitude to marriage differed at various stages of her life and became more pressing as she seemed likely to outlive her father, as she had already done with her five siblings. Although Charlotte thought herself plain and small, and considered herself unlikely to marry, men in her own life were not as undiscerning as some of those in her novels. A final irony, however, is that she was not in love with any of her suitors and those men she did love she could not marry.

Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Early Novellas, Jane Eyre and Villette: The Legacy of Finic’s Disabled and Racialized Body
pp. 114-124 Author: Pike, Judith E.
Abstract: 
In The Foundling (1833), Charlotte Brontë introduces Finic as a ‘deaf-mute’ dwarf whose body acts as a microcosm of nineteenth-century views on disability and race. Influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s The Black Dwarf, Charlotte Brontë renders her dwarf deaf, and then in A Leaf from an Unopened Volume (1834) she links his disabilities to miscegenation. Whereas Finic’s disabled body is portrayed as abject, Charlotte Brontë elevates other physical disabilities, such as the storyteller’s club feet, for his disability connects him to Byron and Scott. Representations of disability in Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia also inform her later portrayals of disability in Jane Eyre and Villette.

Towards Modern Aesthetics: Charlotte Brontë and J. M. W. Turner
pp. 125-135 Author: Choe, Jian
Abstract: 
This article aims to consider the intersections between Charlotte Brontë and William Turner, as shown in their text and image, centring upon the ways in which they worked towards the style that would be called impressionism. This particular aesthetic can clarify all the major dimensions of their mature art: epistemological, technical and even thematic. Their artistic careers coincided with a period of great social change and their innovative art was forged in response to the shifting conditions of their time. They witnessed the advent of the modern world, attempting to give form to the new mode of existence and consciousness. An inquiry into the parallels between the two eminent Victorians suggests that they carved out an aesthetic of modernity, which laid the foundation for the future course of art and literature.

Immaterial Correspondence: Letters, Bodies and Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
pp. 136-146 Author: Koehler, Karin
Abstract: 
This article examines how Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) revises the eighteenth-century literary convention of presenting letters as substitutes for, and extensions of, correspondents’ bodies. It argues that Lucy Snowe, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, strategically suppresses the material nature of correspondence, embracing a model of disembodied epistolary textuality in its place. She does so, the essay suggests, in order to resist her society’s oppressive gender roles and sexual hierarchies. Lucy produces her own texts to evade dominant cultural readings of, and scripts for, her female body. She thus successfully negotiates an unusual degree of intellectual and economic independence while also retaining a possibility — albeit compromised — of romantic fulfilment.

The Presentation of Mr Kenneth in Wuthering Heights
pp. 147-155 Author: Tytler, Graeme
Abstract: 
Emily Brontë’s presentation of Mr Kenneth, the village doctor in Wuthering Heights, deserves closer scrutiny than it appears to have received from scholars hitherto. As well as being portrayed as someone whose medical authority is almost invariably deferred to by the local inhabitants, including those who momentarily balk at his well-founded prognoses, Kenneth comes across as quite representative of the essentially patriarchal ethos permeating the community he serves. Yet, despite being a respectable general practitioner, Kenneth nevertheless has professional limitations that seem in some way not unconnected with those occasions when he betrays certain moral failings: to wit, his tendency to make thoughtless pronouncements about people, his eager ear for scandalous gossip, and his avoidance of emotional involvement through recourse to trite metaphysical utterances. Still, it may be principally owing to such failings that Kenneth remains one of the most memorable medical doctors in English fiction.

The Meaning of Exile: The Importance of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s Early Years in Ireland
pp. 156-163 Author: Wilks, Brian
Abstract:
Patrick Brontë spent his first quarter-century in Northern Ireland, his native land, living through the violence and chaos of the years leading to the Rebellion of the Society of United Irishmen in 1798 in which his brother fought for the rebels, and the succeeding fallout. In this paper I explore the consequences that this experience may have had on Patrick Brontë, the effects of ‘circumstance’ and the reasons for and importance of his voluntary exile from his home. I also discuss how this early exposure to turbulence and rebellion may have rippled down into the writings of his children.

Reviews
Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
pp. 164-166 Author: Mullis, Aileen

Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story
pp. 166-167  Author: Mullis, Aileen

Charlotte Brontë
pp. 167-168  Author: Duckett, Bob

The Last Brontë: The Intimate Memoir of Arthur Bell Nicholls
pp.168-170 Author: Cook, Peter

Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë’s Troubled Brussels Legacy
pp.170-171 Author: Duckett, Bob

Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination
pp.171-172 Author: Pearson, Sara L.