Reading Charlotte Bronte through Jamaica Kincaid

This is a new scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

The Routledge Companion to Global Women's Writing

Edited By Ina C. Seethaler, Tripthi Pillai

Routledge

ISBN 9781032431055

Published December 9, 2025

Covering both traditional and emerging issues and methodologies, The Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing equips readers with interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to women’s writing in the global context. Movements and experiences continuously shaping the twenty-first century clarify the urgent need for expanding and re-envisioning academic and social definitions of gender, location, and creative expression. The Companion forges new directions in and conceptualizations of identity, experience, and practice of diverse communities across the world. The volume provides a conjunctive methodology, building on existing scholarly frameworks while encouraging readers to envision new possibilities that enhance future conversations and a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, ranging from established authors’ commentary on key debates to the innovative work of emerging scholars and practitioners. Offering diverse critical and creative access to the nexus of women’s writing, this Companion provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction for those looking to extend their knowledge of this essential field.

The book includes the chapter:

From Jane Eyre to Xuela Claudette Richardson: Reading Charlotte Bronte through Jamaica Kincaid by Manisha Basu

While academic convention has read the postcolonial riposte to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) in and through Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this chapter proposes to document Jamaica Kincaid’s work as an adaptation of Brontë’s novel and one that exposes the intersectionality of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and gender/sexuality in the making of the Victorian world. The term “autobiography” is embedded in both titles, both protagonists are, for all practical purposes, orphaned, and exposed early on in their lives, to completely loveless conditions, and both are angry, rebellious women. However, where Kincaid’s protagonist (Xuela Claudette Richardson) gives free rein to her anger in rejecting outright any and all conventions of romantic and familial/maternal love, monogamous conjugality, marriage, gendered identities, and Christian sentiment, Bronte’s titular protagonist navigates the rebellious streak in her nature through the echo chamber of the native character, Bertha Mason. This chapter builds up to the argument that Xuela is who Bertha would have been had she lived and had she not been confined to the attic, as Bertha was by Edward Rochester—a powerful native force that endures even as figures representative of the colonizer, the possessive patriarch, the colonial sycophant, and the monogamy-bound jealous woman wane in the face of her power.