Vulnerability, Losing the Plot, Subversive and Female Identity

 A new scholar series with Brontë-related content:

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1
1840s and 1850s
Editors: Gavin, Adrienne E., de la L. Oulton, Carolyn W.
Palgrave-MacMillan
ISBN:  978-3-319-78226-3
August 2018

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined.
Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women’s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume’s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.

Includes the chapters:

Jane Eyre, Orphan Governess: Narrating Victorian Vulnerability and Social Change
Wagner, Tamara S.
Pages 81-95

‘I was in the condition of mind to be shocked at nothing’: Losing the Plot in Wuthering Heights
de la L. Oulton, Carolyn W.
Pages 97-110

Anne Brontë: An Unlikely Subversive
Le Veness, Kristin A.
Pages 111-122

‘There never was a mistress whose rule was milder’: Sadomasochism and Female Identity in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Boucher, Abigail
Pages 181-195