Brontë Studies. Volume 45. Issue 4

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 45 Issue 4, September 2020) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. 307-308  Author:  Amber M. Adams

Editorial Choices and Lived Religion: The Reverend Mr Patrick Brontë’s Sunday School Hymn Book and Hymn Sheets for Haworth Children, 1827–1835
pp.  309-322  Author: Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa
Abstract: 
Based on archival research at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, this paper contributes to our growing appreciation for the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s religious principles by exploring his Sunday School hymn book held at the Parsonage Museum alongside the hymn sheets for his annual Haworth Sunday School Anniversaries. I investigate not only which hymns he marked in his hymn book and later used for the Anniversary services, but also which hymns and specific stanzas he disregarded, even which stanzas he rewrote before printing. Examining Brontë as editor, I suggest the religious views he was indirectly promoting: progressive views which empowered children and highlighted heaven in the midst of death. The power of hymns through repetition and singing became a lived religion for his congregants and a source of spiritual inspiration for his own literary daughters sitting in the pews.

‘Leave this wilderness and go out hence’: Women’s Work and Colonial Domesticity in Villette
pp. 323-335 Author: Jung, Seohyon
Abstract: 
Being motherless and feeling homeless, Lucy Snowe continues to move outwards as she develops her economy-driven mind as a working woman. Through a seemingly detached protagonist’s travels across national boundaries, Charlotte Brontë unveils the material — in conjunction with the sentimental — foundations of the idea of British domesticity that hinges on exploitative economic practices at home and abroad. This article examines Lucy’s development as a constant struggle with mother figures and the domesticity they represent in the novel. While Lucy questions and reconstructs the idea of home through her work, her international attempts at romance with Dr John and M. Paul demonstrate the colonial implications of femininity and domesticity.

‘Every movement floating, every voice echo-like’: Villette as a Cinematic Text
pp.  336-346   Author: Choe, Jian
Abstract: 
This article aims to reappraise Villette as a proto-cinematic text, considering the images and techniques of the motion picture as shown in the novel. Published in 1853 prior to the advent of film, Villette was not consciously influenced by the new medium. Yet the key aspects of its form and content, including its fractured structure, temporal discontinuity, camera-eye presentation and urban modern themes, represent an innovative mode of writing, which was to be called ‘cinematic’ half a century later. The novel thus predates the literary appropriation of cinematography that proliferated from the early twentieth century onwards. The presence of film qualities in Villette indicates that Charlotte Brontë fashioned an experimental modern aesthetic in her final masterpiece, envisioning the world with new eyes and anticipating a new art of the coming century.

Barbara’s History: ‘Refining’ Jane Eyre
pp. 347-359  Author: Steere, Elizabeth
Abstract: 
Amelia B. Edwards’s 1864 novel Barbara’s History is a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) that duplicates much of its predecessor’s plot. Contemporary critics acknowledged the obvious similarities, but intriguingly, some declared that Barbara’s History was a vast improvement on Charlotte Brontë’s original novel, since Edwards tempers Charlotte’s ‘rudeness’ and demonstrates her own ‘cultivation’ through her revisions. During the heyday of sensational ‘bigamy novels’, Edwards strips Jane Eyre of its actual bigamy, de-sensationalizing it and ‘refining’ it in an effort to enhance her authorial credibility and moral character.

The Treatment of Grief in Wuthering Heights
pp. 360-373 Author: Yamanouchi, Rie
Abstract:
Emily Brontë depicts many deaths and subsequent grief in Wuthering Heights. This paper contends, with references to medical and psychological research on grief and mourning, that these mourning scenes are highly accurate and realistic, and that Emily Brontë has a good understanding of the nature of human grief. At the same time, it points out that, despite the accuracy of her descriptions of grief, the aspect of grief for deceased mothers is unnaturally missing from Wuthering Heights, even though several mothers pass away in the story. The paper explores the possible reason for this exclusion. While Emily Brontë’s accurate depictions of the bereavement support the powerful realism of Wuthering Heights, the ‘missing grief’ suggests the possibility that she avoided re-experiencing, in fiction, the grieving process over her mother and mother substitutes that she experienced in her own life.

A Brontë Reading List: Part 12
pp.  374-391 Author: Ogden, James; Cook, Peter & Pearson, Sara L. 
Abstract:
This list is part of an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work. The earlier parts were published in Brontë Studies, 32.2 (July 2007), 33.3 (November 2008), 34.3 (November 2009), 36.4 (November 2011), 37.3 (September 2012), 39.1 (January 2014), 41.3 (September 2016), 42.4 (November 2017), 43.4 (October 2018), 44.3 (July 2019) and 44.4 (October 2019). The present part covers work published in 2017. Bibliographical details are followed where possible by summaries and assessments. Essays published in Brontë Studies are as a rule excluded, as are books reviewed in Brontë Studies; readers are directed to the publisher’s website, www.tandfonline.com, for online access. The author of each entry is indicated by the author’s initials in brackets following the entry.

 REVIEWS

A Marble Column: Jane Eyre in India
pp. 392-394  Author: Stoneman, Patsy

Brontë’s Mistress
pp. 394-395 Author:  Van der Meer, Carolyne

Victorian pilgrimage: sacred-secular dualism in the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot
pp. 396-397 Author:  Pearson, Sara L.

Charlotte Brontë’s Devotee: William Smith Williams: Friend and mentor to a Host of Victorian Writers and Artists
pp. 397-398 Author:  Adams, Amber M.

Brontë Territories: Cornwall and the unexplored maternal legacy, 1760–1860
pp. 399-400 Author:  Chitham, Edward