Brontë Studies. Volume 46. Issue 3

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 46 Issue 3, July 2021) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp.  225-227 Author:  Amber M. Adams, Josephine Smith & Carolyne Van Der Meer

Remembering the 1824 Crow Hill Bog Burst: Patrick Brontë as a Science Writer
pp.  228-240  Author: Shawna Ross
Abstract: 
This paper explores Patrick Brontë’s legacy as a science writer by comparing his texts on the 1824 Crow Hill Bog Burst (including letters, a delivered sermon, a published sermon, a poem and prefaces to the poem and sermon) to other accounts of the ecological disaster by Airedale poet John Nicholson, Yorkshire agriculturist James Mitchell and millhand John Pickles. This comparison recovers the enduring scientific value of Patrick’s widely misunderstood account of this event and shows how his work incorporates tropes from natural theology to emphasise humans’ moral responsibilities for environmental crises, ultimately making his burst writings an early example of Anthropocene discourse.

Why did Robert Postlethwaite Advertise in the Leeds Intelligencer? An Excursion into Social Networking
pp. 241-248 Author: Bob Duckett & Audrey Hall
Abstract: 
The Reverend Thomas Taylor, minister of the Tottlebank Baptist Chapel, near Ulverston, now in Cumbria, knew Mrs White of Bradford. It was in the White household that Charlotte Brontë was governess in 1841. Thomas Taylor also knew the Postlethwaite family of Broughton-in-Furness, where Branwell Brontë was tutor in 1840. New evidence reveals some unexpected social networks.

Becoming Vashti: Loss, Queer Optimism and Orientalism in Villette
pp.  249-261   Author: Eun (Sam) Shim
Abstract: 
Critics have argued that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette depicts queerness as a radically incoherent, subversive force. Against these readings, this article reconfigures queerness as a liveable concept by arguing that Lucy finds a way to be ‘happily queer’. She does so by embracing genderqueerness as a viable path of life, and I argue that the Oriental figure Vashti plays a vital part in this transformation. While this suggests Charlotte Brontë’s openness towards cultural Others, such homage is Eurocentric because it instrumentalizes the Orient for the Occidental subject. Ultimately, it is at the cost of the so-called ‘Orientals’ that Charlotte Brontë envisions queer happiness.

Violence in Wuthering Heights
pp. 262-273  Author: Graeme Tytler
Abstract: 
Violence in Wuthering Heights is sometimes thought to be so grim in its manifold guises as to leave some readers with the impression that the novel comprises a seemingly endless array of physical attacks on the people portrayed therein. It is true that there are episodes in which some of the central figures inflict bodily assaults of various kinds on one another. Yet it is interesting to note that such assaults are not only comparatively few, but that they have little of the outrageous brutality characteristic of the sundry threats or images of violence which are now and then voiced or harboured by almost all the characters, yet which, ironically enough, are seldom, if ever, effectuated. In other words, much of the violence in the narrative tends to remain safely within the boundaries of the human mind and the human tongue. It is through this very finding, moreover, that we come to see the extent to which Emily Brontë’s treatment of violence is at once discreetly realistic and, from a psychological viewpoint, remarkably modern. But at the same time as the author suggests that a proclivity to violence, whether physical or mental, is inherent in practically all human beings, she nevertheless reminds us, partly through her presentation of Hareton Earnshaw, that there are ways in which violence may be controlled, and even avoided altogether.

The Image of Chains in Emily Brontë’s Poetry: Intimations from Epictetus to Wesley
pp. 274-286 Author:  Paola Tonussi
Abstract:
The feeling of being both physically and spiritually imprisoned recurs in Emily Brontë’s poetry and novel expressed in literal and figurative ‘chains’, ‘fetters’ and ‘prisons’. Such imagery appears to be related to a mystic view of the world, Wesleyan borrowings and Platonic overtones, with a possible admixture of the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus. This paper aims to show how such philosophical “shreds” — derived from various sources, personal as well as school readings — often help the meaning of the imagery move towards a “metaphysical” dimension: never clearly formulated in a cosmological system, yet suggestive of vague but powerful undercurrents.

The Poetry of Emily Brontë and Charlotte Mew
pp.  287-304 Author: Hilary Newman
Abstract:
Although Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) was born just over fifty years after Emily Brontë (1818–1848), there are many similarities between them. They both experienced multiple bereavements. Their closest bonds were with their siblings. Mew idolized Emily Brontë both as a woman and a poet. Mew published an essay on Emily Brontë and wished to edit a complete edition of her poems. Mew’s poems are clearly modelled on those of Emily Brontë. Both poets wrote objective and impersonal poems; they each adopted a variety of voices and personalities to explore such themes as death, both without and with religion. These poems are polyphonic. Both poets experimented with poetic forms. Mew adopted some of the characteristics found in Emily Brontë’s poems, including the frequent repetition of words and phrases to intensify emotions or states of minds or situations. Particularly prominent is shared bird imagery.

‘Something unromantic as Monday morning’: Van Gogh and Charlotte Brontë
pp.  305-316 Author: Jian Choe
Abstract:
Vincent van Gogh had a lifelong fascination with British literature. He admired Charlotte Brontë, among other writers, and was particularly attached to Shirley, her most topical novel. Shirley dramatizes contentious social issues during the Industrial Revolution, which also preoccupied Van Gogh while living in the Borinage, the foremost industrial district of Belgium, in 1878–80. In this context, this article considers some possible parallels between Charlotte Brontë’s text and Van Gogh’s image in terms of aesthetics, subject matter and themes, focusing on Shirley and the body of works that the painter produced in the late 1870s and early 1880s. An interdisciplinary inquiry into the affinities between the two eminent contemporary artists would illuminate their shared attempts to clarify and reformulate the condition of nineteenth-century Europe in their own medium.

Book Reviews

May Sinclair and the Brontë myth: Rewilding and Dissocialising Charlotte
pp.  317-319 Author: Peter Cook

Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898: An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual Notes
pp.  319-320 Author: Karen E. Laird

Anne Brontë Reimagined: A View from the Twenty-First Century
pp.  320-322 Author: Sarah Powell

The Diary Papers of Emily and Anne Brontë
pp.  322-323 Author: Herbert Rosengarten

Mrs. Gaskell’s Personal Pantheon: Illuminating Mrs. Gaskell’s Inner Circle
pp.  324-325 Author: Sara L. Pearson

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor
pp.  326-327 Author: Bob Gamble