Framing the Female Narrative

A thesis and a review:

Framing the Female Narrative: Male Audiences and Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels

by Sammy Murphy

Undergraduate Honors Theses

William & Mary Paper 1989

Since being published, both Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have attracted scholarly and critical attention on account of their framed narratives. At the time of publication, some portion of this attention was negative; however, since the early 20th century, scholars have moved towards recognizing and analyzing potential purposes for the narrative structures of both texts. Within my thesis, I enter into this field of scholarship so as to analyze how the frame narrative functions as a tool for both simulation and subversion within the two texts. More specifically, I argue that Emily and Anne use frame narratives to center the relationship between a male audience and female storyteller. Ultimately, in their specific explorations of this relationship, both sisters subvert a patriarchal approach to female author and text.

War at t’ Parsonage: The Brontës and Military Conflict 
The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writings by Emma Butcher, Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan,  2019, xiii +  216pp., £64.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-3-319-95635-0 (hbk); 978-3-319-95636-7 (ebk)
Simon Avery
Journal of Victorian Culture, vcac043, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac043