Boundless Desires and Writing Communities

New Brontë scholar works:

Nos Désirs Sans Limites
La mise en récit de désirs féminins interdits dans Angéline de Montbrun à la lumière de Jane Eyre
by Virginie Fournier
Voix et Images, Volume 44, Issue 1, Automne 2018, p. 77–91
Contemporanéités d’Angéline de Montbrun et de Laure Conan

Our Boundless Desires
How Forbidden Female Desires Become Narrative in Angéline de Montbrun Viewed in Relation to Jane Eyre

An original and innovative female speech emerges from the narrative shaping of female desires, and the taboos broken by the protagonists, in Jane Eyre and Angéline de Montbrun: adultery in Charlotte Brontë’s novel and incestuous fantasy in Laure Conan’s. Often symbolized by the flames of a hearth fire reflected on the hero’s body, the woman’s gaze rests on the patriarchs. Men in positions of authority, located in the framework of a female focalization, are objectified, integrated into representations that are set in a mise en abyme of the act of writing. Through a study of the issues involved in the narrative shaping of forbidden female desires, Conan’s work is incorporated into a wider, older women’s literary history, one that includes areas yet to be defined by thought. The purpose is to counteract the discriminatory effect of geographical boundaries and national identities so that we can better understand the coherence of the female literary imagination.

The Brontës' writing community: family, partnership and creative collaboration
Braxton, Kimberley Jayne (2019)
Doctoral thesis, Keele University.

In 1846 Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë published Poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. An immediate interest regarding the identity of these mysterious Bells emerged. With the publication of their novels the following year the Brontës established themselves not only as writers, but as a family of writers. The publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë presents three sisters pacing around a table as they share their novels with each other. This scene became firmly embedded in the Brontë mythology. However, from their earliest reviews the interest in the Brontës as a family has threatened to eclipse their work. This thesis argues that by exploring the Brontës’ works critically we are better able to understand their collaborative group, and explore how they imaginatively interpreted the issues of family, community, partnership, and isolation. From within their writing community, two sets of partnerships emerge in the collaborative pairing of Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne. Partnership, rather than family, becomes the Brontës’ central focus as they use their work to process the dynamics of their own collaborative relationships. Throughout the thesis, I analyse critically overlooked resources by all four Brontë siblings, including their juvenilia, letters, diaries, devoirs, in addition to their poetry and novels, in order to demonstrate how their community affected every method of writing they adopted. In addition, this thesis applies collaborative structures to the Brontës in order to present and explore the evolution of their group. In this thesis, I present the Brontës’ writing community as integral to their development, but from within their community they each step forward as four unique, individual writers.