My Victorian Novel

A scholar book with a couple of Brontë-related essays:

My Victorian Novel
Critical Essays in the Personal Voice
Edited by Annette R. Federico

University of Missouri Press

ISBN: 9780826222077

June 2020

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain.

These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives.

By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them.

Including: 

Identifying as a Reader by Andrea Kaston Tange on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

The Hand of Fate by Annette R. Federico on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.