Feminism and Animal Advocacy + Female Friendship Networks

A new scholarly book with Bronté-related chapters:

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism
Edited By Rachel Carroll, Fiona Tolan

Routledge
ISBN 9780367410261
Published December 1, 2023

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism.

Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

The book includes the chapter:

Feminism and animal advocacy in the long nineteenth century. Anne Brontë and the ‘abuses of society’

By Helena Habibi

The year 1847 was a pivotal year in the history of literary feminism and animal advocacy in Britain; in this year, Anne Brontë’s first novel addressing oppressed women and exploited nonhuman animals, Agnes Grey, was published, and the Vegetarian Society, with its concern for animal welfare, was founded. The following year, when Brontë published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel centred around a woman trapped in a marriage to a bird-hunting, abusive husband, the Women’s Rights Association was founded in America. Brontë published her two novels in the context of an emerging feminist-animal advocacy insurgence in Western culture that grew out of the previous generation’s radical vegetarian and feminist politics. This chapter examines Brontë’s fiction in the light of the concomitant women’s movement and animal welfare advocacy that emerged in the 1790s – with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and a plethora of vegetarian treatises that urged better treatment of nonhuman animals – and persisted throughout the nineteenth century. An analysis of the pervasion of animal hunting, consumption, and torture in Brontë’s novels demonstrates intersections between speciesism and gendered oppression, and foregrounds the challenging questions posed by women writers and activists regarding the assumed power of men over women and humans over other animals. This chapter explores the tensions between an Enlightenment legacy of speciesism that underpins Brontë’s feminist fiction and the emergence of a feminist-vegetarian consciousness.

“Men shall not make us foes”

Charlotte Brontë's letters and her female friendship networks

By Deborah Wynne

This chapter charts the development of Charlotte Brontë’s professional identity as an author, arguing that her involvement in a network of female friends played a crucial role in the creation of the female narrators of her novels, Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853). The letters exchanged between Brontë and her female friends, particularly fellow authors Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Taylor, offer valuable insights into the importance of female friendship networks in the nineteenth century. Through her correspondence with female friends and colleagues, Brontë gained valuable opportunities to discuss women’s social roles, professional lives, and ambitions, which in turn encouraged her to explore ways for her female protagonists to express themselves, particularly their desires for independence. Examining Brontë’s letters, as well as her fiction, this chapter will show how her feminist ideas were shaped through the channels of a Victorian female friendship network.