A Feminist Voice in the Novel

A new Brontë-related thesis:

Anne Brontë: A Feminist Voice in the Novel

Paloma Ríos Prieto (2021)

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (España). Facultad de Filología

Anne Brontë: A Feminist Voice in the Novel considers the significance that the Victorian writer has for Gender Studies when her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are examined from a feminist standpoint. By means of a realist narrative style, inspired by the author´s purpose of telling the truth in order to make the world a better place for humanity, her discourse endorses a didactic feminism that addresses women´s issues such as the domestic violence or the advantageous convenient marriages Victorian women had to withstand to satisfy the standards implicit in the archetype of the ‘angel in the house’. Although her two novels might be read as a call of attention to her society and reformists to improve the inequitable situation of and for women, Anne Brontë´s image as a dull, unoriginal and undervalued writer has subsisted along two centuries. This lesser position that Anne Brontë has, as a remarkable literary figure, was initially nurtured by her eldest sister Charlotte, and then perpetuated by Charlotte´s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell and later on in time, disseminated by feminist theorists such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar or Terry Eagleton. The undermined view that the contemporary world has about Anne Brontë has resulted in a non-appreciative audience of her work as popular adaptations about Agnes Grey do not exist, and they are rather insufficient for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Brontë´s unpopularity has motivated the construction of popular adaptations such as comic strips, sketches, parodies or memes that mock at the nineteenth- century writer. Nevertheless, recent in-depth studies on behalf of academicians such as Adelle Hay, Samantha Ellis, Patsy Stoneman or Elizabeth Langland, along with the contribution of scholars in the literary academic Brontë journal, “Brontë Studies”, are fostering a new interpretation in which to see Anne Brontë and her novels in a new direction that acknowledges her courage as a woman and her talent as an author.