The Brontë Sisters on Foot and Social Attitudes in Shirley

New Brontë-related scholar papers:

The Brontë Sisters on Foot: Walking as a Reconfiguration of the Brontë Myth in Sally Wainwright’s BBC Biopic To Walk Invisible

Sandra Dinter 

English Studies (2020), DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2020.1847893

This article examines forms and functions of pedestrian movement in Sally Wainwright’s television film To Walk Invisible (BBC, 2016) about the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Proceeding from the premise that walking constitutes a core trope of the Brontë myth, the paper begins with a survey of figurations of walking in the biographies and works of the Brontë sisters, in filmic adaptations of their novels and lives, and in the industry of literary tourism in Haworth. In close readings of selected scenes from the biopic, the article illustrates that Wainwright employs walking as a versatile cinematic tool to characterise the three sisters and to assign to them different concepts of authorship. Furthermore, To Walk Invisible uses pedestrian mobility as a metaphor to critique gender ideologies of Victorian Britain for a contemporary audience and to market the Yorkshire moors as an attractive tourist destination. Finally, walking also features as a self-referential impulse in the film. It allows Wainwright to open a metaperspective on the Brontë myth in British heritage culture to which To Walk Invisible itself contributes as a literary biopic.

And a paper in an Uzbekistan journal:

Description of Social Attitudes in the Novel Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

by Darvishova, Gulchehra

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal: Vol. 2020 : Iss. 1 , Article 38, pp 48

This article is dedicated to Brontë’s most distinctive novel – “Shirley”. The novel stands out from the work of Charlotte Brontë especially due to its differences from her other novels – it differs significantly in the structure, narrative style, setting, characters and general tone. It is also the only novel explicitly touching upon the political issues of the times and is therefore often categorized as a social novel. At the same time, readers may still find some of the themes so typical for the work of Brontë. Brontë’s primary aim was to portray lives of different individuals in context of social attitudes and social forces and how these social elements affect and control their lives in various ways. Social attitudes, political issues of the times are outlined in this article as well.