A new essay on Anne Brontë just published:
Cassity Oertle
Essais. An Undergraduate Journal For Literary And Cultural Theory And Criticism, Vol. 15 No. 1 Spring 2025, pp 87-100
On many online book forums and social media platforms, Anne Brontë is often regarded as the forgotten Brontë sister, and for a lot of us this is true. We may have read Jane Eyre or toiled through Wuthering Heights in our own reading or in high school classrooms, but not many have even heard of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or Agnes Grey. Even in academic spheres, Anne Brontë is pushed aside or only viewed in comparison with her sisters. “The structure of Anne’s novels, however, has neither the intriguing ambivalences of Charlotte nor the tragic contradictions of Emily,” says Terry Eagleton, a fellow of Wadham college at Oxford University in his book Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (122). For the most part, Anne’s position as a writer seems to be relevant only when it is useful in engaging conversations about her sisters. Eagleton also echoes what other scholars consider the overindulgence of Anne in moralistic or religious themes in her novels, saying that Anne’s writing “knows no such internal conflict between the flesh and the spirit” and that her novels “find the world morally mixed, but they do not find morality in the least problematical” (123). While this may be true, Anne could have had a purpose in integrating morality so deeply into her novels.
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