Violence and the Brontës

This is a newly published scholarly book on the Brontës:

Violence and the Brontës

Language, Reception, Afterlives

Sophie Franklin

Edinburgh University Press (DeGruyter Brill)

eBook ISBN: 9781399523028

September 30, 2025

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontës’ representations of brutality shocked initial Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontës accounts for such intense reactions by tracing the sisters’ self-conscious grappling with the transformational complexities of representing violence in literature as a destructive but also mutually creative force. Through a new reading of the Brontës’ major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontës’ imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life and continues to be vital to interpreting their works’ reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

Table of contents:

Introduction: The Brontës and Violence
1. ‘Generally represented by a dash’: Emily Brontë’s Stylistics of Violence
2. ‘The acute diseases of nations’: Contaminating Violence in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Angrian Tales.
3. ‘Cupid’s arrows have been too sharp for you’: The Violence of Romantic Love in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hal
4. ‘After the manner of Jael to Sisera’: Transformational Violence in Agnes Grey and Villette
5. ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice’: Brontë Afterlives and the Legacies of Violence
Conclusion: The Brontës’ Violent Returns
Bibliography