Brontë Studies. Volume 49. Issue 3

The new (double) issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 49  Issues 3. July 2024) is available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Gothic Introspection: How Villette Nurtures Empathy and Reader Identity
pp. 165-180 Author: Rachel Baldacchino
Abstract:
While Charlotte Brontë is considered one of the foremost nineteenth-century writers of Gothic psychological realism, scholars have paid little attention to how a reading of the psychologies of her characters may impact readers’ thoughts on their own identity and mental state. This article redresses this gap by combining the field of Gothic Studies with narrative empathy studies to posit that Brontë’s use of Victorian Gothic motifs in her novel Villette (1853), such as the doppelgänger, excess and the abject, prompts readers into considering the struggles of their psychological well-being and how it affects their identity. Through entering a reflection on personal psychological adversity, readers are encouraged to consider how Villette teaches audiences the power of understanding how psychological maladies impact selfhood. This article will analyse how Lucy’s narration, her relationship with the Nun and the novel’s ending connect to Lucy’s psychology and, therefore, create empathetic connections with readers who can better understand their own experiences and mental well-being after reading Villette.

Kindness, Eros and Agnes Grey
pp 181-192 Author: Janina Hornosty
Abstract
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is about many things: chief among them is kindness. In this short novel, the words ‘kind’ and ‘kindness’ appear over 50 times. In the course of the work, we are brought to see that kindness is not a weak flame over which the downtrodden can warm their hands a little but rather a bonfire of a life force, the source of social good, and between Agnes Grey and Edward Weston, mutual kindness—specifically the shared valuing of kindness itself—ignites eros. As Marianne Thormӓhlen rightly observed, ‘Agnes Grey’s falling in love with Mr Weston is erotically charged in ways which present-day readers easily overlook’. I want to argue that this erotic charge is an intensification of currents of feeling that characterise Agnes’s whole narrative. The way Agnes describes, late in the novel, the pressure of her lover’s hand could also describe her experiences of kindness, both given and received, throughout her life: ‘emphatic, yet gentle’.

Prospect and Refuge in Villette’s Forbidden Garden
pp. 193-206 Author: Daniel Dougherty
Abstract:
During the Victorian period, the expansion of the domestic sphere into the garden afforded women greater agency within their own physical and psychological landscapes. The Pensionnat in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) provides Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, with access to a forbidden avenue within the school garden, initially providing her with shelter and solitude. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this article reads the novel through the lens of the ‘prospect–refuge’ theory developed by the aesthetic geographer Jay Appleton, which considers people’s emotional and psychological responses to their environment. It explores the symbolic uses of the garden space to convey the emotional landscape of characters as well as examining how Brontë positions her protagonist in the garden to allow Lucy freedoms not easily afforded within formal indoor settings.

The Eyes Have It: Physiognomy, Gender and Construction of the Public and Private Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
pp. 207-224 Author: AnnaLiese Burich
Abstract:
In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), the narrator remarks of the eponymous heroine: ‘Her nature is in her eye …’ (Brontë [1849] 2008, 326). Specifically, throughout the text, Shirley’s eyes are described as flashing; Caroline’s, meanwhile, are described as glowing. While Brontë’s interest in and exploration of phrenology is well-documented, Shirley’s focus on the eyes is quintessentially physiognomic. This article explores the two major sequences that describe the heroines’ flashing and glowing eyes in relation to Brontë’s use of physiognomic principles and her ideals of gender. I argue that Brontë’s portrayal of Shirley and Caroline not only questions the allegedly unifying power of physiognomy but also gives it a phrenological treatment in which the external signifier does not always match the internal signified. Furthermore, the specific imagery of flashing and glowing is emblematic of Shirley’s refusal to adhere to binaries. While flashing ‘reads’ as masculine and glowing ‘reads’ as feminine, Brontë’s conception of Shirley and Caroline demonstrates that masculinity and femininity, far from being a binary, work on a scale.

‘A morsel of real solid joy’ and a ‘knot of hardness’: Solidity in the Works of Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf
pp. 225-237 Author: Susie Gharib
Abstract:
This article explores ideas of solidity in the writings of Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf. It is the first study of its kind in its aim to use solidity to reconcile two writers whose literary affinities, I propose, outnumber their differences. The article demonstrates that in Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Woolf’s The Waves (1931), the theme of solidity manifests itself in similar forms. It will show how the lingual, written or spoken word, which offers substantial sustenance to characters, is one such form. Similarly, it will show how solidity is present in both Brontë’s and Woolf’s portrayal of passion, the spiritual and the sexual. The presentation of solid objects as anchors and armours, tying characters to the real world, is a third similar manifestation of solidity in these works. Finally, a very remarkable common aspect of solidity can be found in their depiction of London, the urban setting that breeds knots of hardness.

Special Interest Article

An Earnest Address: Insights Into Patrick Brontë’s Opinions in the 1830s Decade of Reform
pp. 238-244 Author: Peter Mullins former Rector of Haworth
Abstract:
Earnest Address to the Working Classes (1836), a pseudonymous tract—a copy of which was owned and valued by the Reverend Patrick Brontë—provides an insight into the opinions that would have been talked over in the Haworth Parsonage as his daughters were growing up. These include the background to Charlotte Brontë’s visit to a Catholic confessional during her time in Belgium; the tensions in financing the Haworth Parish Church in a largely dissenting village; and Patrick’s political campaign against the new workhouse system. This special interest article advocates that Earnest Address to the Working Classes deserves to be better known and more widely studied.

Book Reviews

The Badass Brontës

pp 245-246 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer

Jane Eyre (Andrews McMeel) / Wuthering Heights (Andrews McMeel)

pp. 247-248 Author: Rose Dawn Gant

The Brontës’ ‘Web of Childhood’, an Exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. February 1st, 2024–January 1st, 2025

pp. 248-249 Author: Jenna Grqy

The Industrial Brontës: Advocates for Women’s Equality in a Turbulent Age

pp. 250-251 Author: Sara Pearson

‘Shirley – Charlotte Bronte and the Industrial Novel’, a partnership event with the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, Manchester Metropolitan University and The Portico Library
pp 251-253 Author: Karen Kempe

Call for Papers

‘Under an African summer’s sun’ Re-Mapping the Brontës: Place, Race and Empire

pp 254-255