Brontë Studies. Volume 47. Issue 2

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 47 Issue 2, April 2022) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp.  85-88 Author:  Fanning, Susan

Anne Brontë and Geology: a Study of her Collection of Stones
pp.  89-112  Author: Sally Jaspars, Stephen A. Bowden, Enrique Lozano Diz & Hazel Hutchison

This research is focussed on Anne Brontë’s collection of stones, which are housed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and how they connect to her time in Scarborough. Obtained during the ‘golden age’ of geology, the collection was recently recharacterized using Raman spectroscopy. In this interdisciplinary study, we explore possible sources of the stones and the different factors that may have influenced Anne to obtain and maintain her collection of stones. The significance of Anne Brontë’s stones and her connections to mineralogy and geology reveal Anne’s interest, knowledge and abilities within these fields.

Salvator Rosa’s Influence on Emily Brontë
pp.  113-127   Author: Starke, Sue
Abstract
Emily Brontë was a landscape artist in two media: text and image. Her aesthetic was shaped by the work of the seventeenth-century Italian artist Salvator Rosa, whose ‘spiritual landscapes’ of the dark, rocky and mountainous Abruzzi wilderness captured the imagination of earlier English collectors before being dismissed as old-fashioned by Victorian art critics. Contemporary reviewers of Wuthering Heights recognized the affinity of visual sensibility between the two, while the novel employs a landscape iconography derived from Rosa. The most notable example is the motif of the twisted fir tree, which figures prominently in the novel and inspired her to make her own pencil drawing study. Emily Brontë infuses the Salvatorian sublime into her descriptions of landscape while also channelling Rosa’s fascination with outlaws in the wilderness in the characters in her Gondal poems. A study of Rosa’s influence on Emily Brontë’s work reveals her to be a sophisticated aesthetic archaist.

Policing Victorian Women’s Desire: Retracing Mirrored Patriarchy in Jane Eyre and Villette
pp. 158-1 160 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer
Abstract: 
This essay locates avenues in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette for discussing the parameters of women writers’ internalized patriarchy in Victorian Britain. The first segment treats the importance of the protagonists’ reliance upon different mise-en-abyme books, which act as mirrors that reflect and foreshadow the forlornness of Victorian women in Charlotte Brontë’s two novels. In the second segment, we discuss how Jane and Lucy acknowledge and become the delegates of Thanatos, the androcentric privilege, at the end of their narratives. Psychoanalytic concepts such as the mirror metaphor and the discussion of Eros and Thanatos are used as means to appreciate the detour of desire (which constitutes literary narrative) in the inevitable tour of death.

John Robinson, Mr Nicholls and the Brontës
pp. 141-153 Author:  Juliet Hesle
Abstract:
Anne

Much is known about the people who were close to the Brontës, but John Robinson, a young boy who lived one mile from Haworth, in Stanbury, is given only a sentence or two 
in several major biographies.
When he was thirteen, John became a pupil-teacher at the school in Haworth, a role for which he required extra tuition. He received this on Saturday mornings from the Rev Arthur Bell Nicholls. During his lessons, John witnessed first-hand Mr Nicholls' distress over his unrequited love for Charlotte Brontë—a situation John never forgot and was able to vividly recall later in life. Two newspaper articles featuring John's reminiscences add much to our knowledge about the private suffering of Mr Nicholls as well as John's closeness to his teacher. When Mr Nicholls married Charlotte, John was one of the few people invited to attend the ceremony. By the time he was eighteen, following the progress he had made in his studies, John was about to embark on a promising career when he received some very personal gifts from Patrick BrontëIn ttis paper, I hope to retrieve John from obscurity by examining the nature of his unique, close relationship with Mr Nicholls while revealing the esteemed place he held within the Brontë family. Brontë’s ‘A Hymn’ was written at a time when hymns were ‘of the moment’ and many women were engaged in hymnody. It shares with Anne’s other religious poems a vision of God as mighty, powerful, loving, merciful and actively interventionist, and a vision of humanity as feeble, inadequate, inconstant and inconsistent. It is distinguished by its exploration of two versions of the universe: one informed by God its Creator and the other its Godless alternative. ‘A Hymn’ has many traditional stylistic features of hymns and on one level belongs to a familiar class of hymn, the hymn of doubt; but it is also radical in facing head-on an atheistic vision emerging in the nineteenth century.

Book Reviews
Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885
pp. 154-156 Author: Jacqueline H. Harts

Charlotte & Arthur
pp.  156-158  Author: Sophie Franklin

The The Wool Is Rising and Shirley and the Leeds Mercury
pp. 158-159 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer