From Feminist to Wife

 A recent presentation at the College of DuPage Library Student Research Symposium 2025:

From Feminist to Wife: Domesticity and Interiority in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Kathryn Hardy, College of DuPage

Both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall chronicle dramatic female escapes from domestic confinement, just for the protagonists to end up in a similar predicament by the end of the novel. Through analyzing textual and biographical evidence, my research postulates why both Charlotte and Anne Bronte placed these characters back into Victorian domestic ideology by tracking the evolution of the characters' internal reactions to these spaces throughout the novel.