A couple of new studies of Brontë, specifically Anne's, juvenilia:
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2023): Journal of Juvenilia Studies
The question of how the material imagination develops from a child to an adult writer may be approached in many ways. In the case of the Brontës, attention has tended to focus on the materiality of the miniature books in which they recorded their childhood “plays” or on the physical objects that both furnished the parsonage at Haworth and stimulated their young imaginations. In this essay, I take a different approach, considering materiality in the broadest possible sense as the physical complex of space and time that defines the universe.
Using this conception of materiality, I set out to the chart the development of Anne Brontë’s material imagination from her juvenile to her post-juvenile writing by comparing representations of time and space in her teenage poem “Alexander and Zenobia” and in her first mature literary work, the novel Agnes Grey. In considering the movement of characters through time and space in these two texts, I focus on a specific narrative motif—the lovers’ reunion—in order to identify both continuities and differences between Brontë’s younger and more mature literary methods.
Beverly Taylor
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2023): Journal of Juvenilia Studies
This discussion considers how Anne Brontë’s juvenile productions--her poems and drawings executed before the age of nineteen--anticipate the themes and manner of her adult novels, published as the work of Acton Bell. In setting age nineteen as the upper boundary for her juvenilia, I choose an age somewhat earlier than we usually think of juvenilia, because at age nineteen Anne in effect moved into the adult world by taking a job to support herself as a full-time governess for the Ingham family, moving away from home to educate children who were not her relatives. I do not mean to approach the juvenilia material in a teleological way, implying that Anne was developing toward a goal which we can now discern through the gift of hindsight. Rather, I want to examine what the surviving material objects—the juvenilia drawings and poems--reveal, and then ask how these perspectives persist into the adult writings. In considering the juvenile writings and drawings in terms of what they reveal about Anne’s adult novels, I am preoccupied with "things" that she employed in her writing and visual art to convey meaning, such as trees and shrubberies in her early drawings, or birds and dogs.
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