The new issue of
Brontë Studies (Volume 50 Issue 3, July 2025) is
available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:
Introduction: The Brontës and the Wild
pp 173-179 Author: Ross, Shawna
Humans and Wild Creatures in the Brontë Fiction
pp 180-195 Author: Sunderland, Jane
Abstract:
While Brontë aficionados will likely be familiar with the Brontë family dogs, and perhaps Emily’s merlin, Nero, as well as the range of domestic dogs in the Brontë fiction, less likely to come to mind are non-domestic animals and birds. Yet there is a (perhaps unsurprising) number of each in the novels. Looking first at the ‘wild creatures’ in Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s own lives, the article then focuses on their creation of fictional wild creatures and their fictional humans’ ‘interspecies interaction’ with these creatures, considering first, hunting as sport and second, disruptive human interaction with birds in their nests. Through interspecies interaction, these episodes serve to characterise their associated fictional humans and to provide metaphorical readings. Through these literary strategies, Charlotte, Emily and Anne explore in different but complementary ways what it means to be human, ways which disrupt notions of human–moral superiority and indeed of any neat ‘human–animal’ binary.
Emily’s Merlin: Brontëan Myths, the Decline of Raptors and the Diminished Ecology of Haworth Moor
pp 196-211 Author: Stewart, Michael
Abstract
In the early 1840s, Emily Brontë acquired a merlin bird, probably from the moors above Haworth. This article examines the significance and provenance of this raptor within Brontëan heritage and scholarship, including the influence of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (1797/1804) on the life and work of Emily and the rest of the Brontë family. It also explores the absence of Emily’s merlin, which she named Nero, from the writing of her major biographers as well as the absence of her painting, probably of the same bird, and outlines my findings in relation to the identification of the bird. Taking a hybrid critical-creative approach towards this subject, the essay also looks at the plight of the merlin today.
Jane Eyre, Horticulture and the Fern
pp. 212-226 Author: Wu, Yih-Dau
Abstract:
This article explores the interplay between the fern and Charlotte Brontë’s horticultural imagination in Jane Eyre (1847). The novel apparently shares an obvious ideological affinity with Victorian horticulture. Both Brontë’s Bildungsroman and Victorian horticulture are concerned with the development and improvement of an organic life. However, horticulture does not only bear on Brontë’s text metaphorically. This article shows that whenever Brontë alludes to the fern in the novel, she evokes real-life horticultural practices, such as John Loudon’s plant houses, Jane Loudon’s gardening lessons and Nathaniel Ward’s glazed cases. The novel engages with contemporary horticulture most subtly by describing how the fern transforms disciplinary regimes and restrictive enclosures calculated to restrain the heroine’s passionate nature. Consistently reconfiguring the claustrophobic environment with which Jane Eyre grapples, centring analysis on the fern invites a fresh understanding of her circumscribed existence. Examing the fern in Jane Eyre reveals how Brontë’s horticultural knowledge informs the feminist and colonial aspects of the novel..
‘I know no medium’: Temperature and Ferndean in Jane Eyre
pp. 227-241 Author: Bliss, Sarah
Abstract:
Tucked away at the end of Jane Eyre (1847), Ferndean earns considerably less attention than Jane’s previous homes, both in the text itself and its critical afterlife. However, Ferndean’s temperate and unchanging climate crucially distinguishes it from Jane’s other houses, as its moderate temperatures are in stark contrast to the extreme hot and cold environments in which Jane has lived for the majority of the novel. By embodying the stable and temperate climate that the British closely associated with their national identity, Ferndean provides the ideal setting for Jane Eyre’s resolution. This paper traces the oscillations between extreme hot and cold temperatures in Jane Eyre and argues that the varying climates in the novel vocalise a British fear of unstable weather and temperatures. The text resolves these anxieties about the reliability of the British weather and its insularity from the extreme climates of the British Empire in the neutral, stable temperatures of Ferndean.
Rewilding Jane Eyre
pp. 242-257 Author: Lysack, Krista
Abstract:
This essay considers what a rewilding critical practice would look like with reference to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). At the ecological turn in literary studies, what is there that remains to be said about one of the most canonical novels in Victorian literature? To rewild Jane Eyre, a novel better known for its domestic interiors and production of individualist subjectivity, is to pay attention to the traces of its narrative shadow forests and strange otherweathers, to the latent potential of the novel’s more-than-human forms. Attending to Jane Eyre’s untamed sections, we discover how rewilding attunes us to a dynamic set of aesthetics and ontologies: the substrate and aerial, the ghosted and spectralised. Instead of mastering the unruly ‘wild patch’ of Jane’s wander through moorland wilderness, we wonder over it, even as it presses us into the present moment of ecological crisis. A tarrying with the strange, ludic rewilding has the potential to reactivate the dormant systems of even our most familiar literary objects.
Rewilding Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre, Interpretation and Literary Historiography
pp. 258-272 Author: Fagan, Joshua
Abstract:
What characterised the initial, feverish response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), this article argues, was an acknowledgement of the book’s wildness: its strange, disconcerting unwillingness to assert conventional mores and expectations. Even the negative responses decrying the book as demoniacally immoral called attention to how wild the narrative initially appeared. The article asserts that, starting with Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, successive generations of critics elevated Brontë and her most famous work into the heights of the British poetic canon by propagating a tamed, domesticated mythology that viewed Brontë as a long-suffering waif and Jane Eyre as a pious book about the importance of self-denial and enduring suffering. The article asserts how writers, notably Victorian ‘men of letters’ such as Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, made Brontë and her moorland environs appear unthreatening, and it emphasises how recent scholars and critics have succeeded in ‘rewilding’ Brontë, reawakening the intriguingly disorienting strangeness that was so evident to Jane Eyre’s initial readers.
‘Doomed to decay:’ Endogenic Nature and Impersonal Affect in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 273-292 Author: Martin, Emily
Abstract:
This essay examines the ecological and affective dimensions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), arguing that the novel functions as a Gothic climate narrative, deeply aware of the consequences of a rapidly changing anthropocentric world disconnected from nature. By analysing Brontë’s depiction of human and non-human encounters within the novel, particularly those of Catherine and Heathcliff, the article argues that the moor’s landscape and climate act as active agents that catalyse material and affective change. Brontë’s textual, literal and affective juxtapositions of landscape and climate with Catherine and Heathcliff critique anthropocentrism as an unsustainable and artificial orientation towards the natural world. Brontë depicts the boundaries between life and death, human and non-human, and inert and vital as inextricably connected through these affective and ecological consequences. Severed from their endogenic connection to the earth, the lovers become fragmented and estranged, ultimately achieving full ecological integration through their regenerative deaths.
‘Written by an eagle’: The Domestication of Character Through Nature in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
pp. 293-306 Author: Cabello Bravo, Andy
Abstract:
Few literary works are as strongly associated with nature as Wuthering Heights (1847). This article explores the representation of nature in Emily Brontë’s novel as embedded in the narrators’ discourse. It contends that the two main narrators, Nelly Dean and Lockwood, enact a process of narrative reinscription that appeases the perceived threat of events. This process entails Catherine and Heathcliff being turned into figurative language so as to be ‘spoken’ and tamed. On the basis that stories equate layers of protection, Nelly Dean and Lockwood reinscribe the landscape symbolically, re-reading those signs whose referent needs to be made palatable. The said signs point to a source of excess in Catherine, Heathcliff and the moors. This paper follows John Hillis Miller, Carol Jacobs and Margaret Homans in the exploration of narrative gaps and patterns, yet it delves deeper into the literary function of nature as a medium to rewrite and domesticate the semiotic geography of Wuthering Heights, and not as mere landscape, however representative of the novel it can be.
Wild Women and Witches in Wuthering Heights and Helen of Four Gates
pp. 307-320 d
Abstract:
This article explores the metaphors of ‘wild’ and ‘witch’ in the representations of heroines in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates (1917), which borrows from Brontë’s novel in terms of its setting, characters and cross-generational plot. The narration frequently uses the adjective ‘wild’ to describe Catherine. While the male characters in both novels regard the second Catherine (Cathy) and Helen as wild witches, the heroines fashion themselves as witches to resist the cultural norm and defy male domination. Focusing on their experiences in the confinement of their bodies and minds such as pregnancy (Catherine and Helen) and domestic violence (Cathy, Isabella and Helen), this article discusses these women’s constant struggles with patriarchal authority and their search for power along with their imaginative engagement with the untamed wild moor. The figure of the wild woman or witch serves as a metaphor and a model for the heroines to liberate themselves from patriarchal confinement and violence.
‘I am [and am not] Heathcliff!’: An Afrocentric Narration on Weathering Wild Relatabilities with Emily Brontë and Her Byronic Hero
pp. 321-336 Author: Smith, Mary-Antoinette
Abstract:
Framed as a tale within the broader tale of academe, this paper originates the genre of ‘ethno-academic narration’ by serving as the testimonial of an African American Victorianist and Brontë enthusiast, which reflectively emerged following a visit to the Parsonage Museum and tour of The Brontë’s and the Wild exhibit. It is proffered from the perspective of a decades-long careerist-of-colour possessing a deep love for the academic profession alongside a vested interest in current conversations concerning ‘undisciplining’ our discipline and the wildly exciting prospect of moving from theory to praxis in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion in Victorian studies.
Wuthering Heights as Operatic and Dramatic Inspiration in Italy
pp. 134-143 Author: De Leo, Maddalena
Abstract:
Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights (1847) has inspired various Italian writers, artists and singers, but here, an almost forgotten Italian opera re-enactment of Brontë’s novel is analysed. It was written and successfully directed in the 1970s by the Apulian composer and conductor Dino Milella, but it has not been performed since and its score, therefore, is unknown.
Book Reviews
The Brontës and Fairy Tales
pp 337-339
Author: Dr. Lydia Craigpp. 341-343
Author: Patsy Stonemanpp. 341-344 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer
The Shelleyan Brontës: Mary and Percy Shelley in the Work of the Brontëspp.344-164 Author: Sarah Wootton
Announcemnts
p 348
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