The House of Polite Brontës

A couple of recent Brontë-related papers:

Muriel Spark and the House of the Brontës: Female Authorship and Autonomy

Kaiyue He

Scottish Literary Review. Association for Scottish Literary Studies

Volume 17, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2025 pp. 145-165

Muriel Spark was obsessed with the Brontë sisters, their house, their literary careers and their afterlives. Although critics have commented on the relationship between Spark’s critical and biographical studies of the Brontës and her own emerging writing practice, few have compared them in depth. This essay classifies Spark, the Brontës, and their female characters as mythmakers, governesses, and tigresses, exploring female authorship and autonomy in the nineteenth and twentieth century and beyond. Spark engages with and imitates the Brontës’ ways of establishing their literary career and fame, but she assumes a critical distance from the Brontës’ solipsism and their self-mythologising process. Spark also moves beyond the Brontës’ scope and discusses women’s claims for their own agency in an increasingly globalised and mediatised consumerist society.

« Sinon impertinente, du moins brusque » : politesse et sentiment national dans Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë (« “If not blunt, at least brusqueˮ: politeness and national sentiment in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre »)

Jeanne Barangé

Romantisme, 210 (4/2025) 'La Politesse'

Cet article étudie le lien entre politesse et sentiment national dans le roman de Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847). La représentation de la politesse, dans ce roman, fait écho à l’élan national qui a lieu au XIXe siècle pour définir l’identité anglaise. L’oeuvre présente Jane comme une figure marginale qui, par son cheminement de l’enfance à l’âge adulte, trouve progressivement sa place dans la société anglaise. Initialement rabrouée pour ses réactions passionnées et comparée à une étrangère, elle apprend à maîtriser les conventions pour mieux les déconstruire. Cet aller-retour entre docilité et impertinence permet au personnage de négocier à la fois sa position dans la hiérarchie sociale et sa position en tant que femme dans la société victorienne. Par la représentation du rapport ambivalent que Jane entretient avec la politesse, le roman célèbre la notion d’Englishness, tout en questionnant sa définition . (This article explores the link between politeness and national sentiment in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre (1847). The representation of politeness in this work reflects the national impetus to define Englishness during the 19th century. The novel presents Jane as a marginal figure who, as she journeys from child to adult, gradually finds her place in English society. Initially reprimanded for her impassioned responses and compared to a foreigner, she learns to grasp the rules of decorum in order to better deconstruct them. Switching between docility and impertinence enables her to negotiate her position both in the social hierarchy and as a woman in Victorian society. In its representation of Jane’s ambivalent relationship with politeness, the novel showcases the concept of Englishness while questioning its definition.)