Editorial Introduction
pp. 1-5 Author: Claire O’Callaghan

Odd and incorrect’: Convention and Jane Eyre’s Feminist Legacy
pp. 6-23 Author: Katharine Hobbs
Abstract:
This article investigates the Victorian reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the collision of literary criticism with political commentary. Brontë’s novel has always had a reputation for being politically troublesome, but no one seems to know why. My essay develops two claims. First, I argue that the novel’s political slipperiness stems from its critics’ inability to agree on what the work actually is. Jane Eyre provoked contradictory judgements from readers who could not reconcile it with existing frameworks of literary convention. The stakes were high, as attempts to define the novel’s genre fused with attempts to produce a coherent sense of literary and social history. Second, I argue that the liberal feminist subject that modern criticism projects backwards onto Jane Eyre did not exist for Victorian readers, and that Brontë’s governess heroine instead activates a historically fraught relationship between character, type, and women’s economic and legal roles. Rather than addressing Jane Eyre directly, I treat it as the absent centre of a debate over convention, waged in reviews, pamphlets and essays, that merged literary criticism with political commentary and set crucial precedents for mid-Victorian legal debates on the woman question.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Horace’s Ars Poetica, Lines 179–88: Nelly Dean as Tragic Nuntius
pp 24-37 Author: Russell M. Hillier
Abstract
A manuscript in the Hugh Walpole Collection of King’s School, Canterbury, attributed to Emily Brontë, consists of translations from Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Ars Poetica. In his groundbreaking analysis of the manuscript, Edward Chitham detects in Brontë’s translation of Horace’s treatise her indebtedness to its precepts on drama and he suggests that the role of chorus applies to Nelly Dean as the principal narrator in Wuthering Heights (1847). Expanding on Chitham’s findings, the article proposes that Nelly Dean more plausibly fulfils the role of a tragic nuntius or messenger. The main principle of the Ars Poetica is decorum, or literary propriety, and Horace instructs that it is decorous for extreme tragic violence to be represented through the nuntius’s reported speech. Nelly delivers an account of and presides over each of Wuthering Heights’s eleven reported deaths and, in accordance with Horatian standards of making known tragic catastrophe, acts as tragic nuntius. Brontë’s formal choices for Wuthering Heights would seem to conform to Horace’s advice that it is decorous for tragic events to be reported rather than performed on stage.

‘I thought unaccountably of fairy tales’: Jane Eyre, Form, and the Fairy Tale Bildungsroman
pp. 38-51 Author: Daniel Dougherty
Abstract:
Frequently Jane Eyre (1847) has been compared to various fairy tales, many of which are seemingly woven through the plot and characters of the novel. Largely unremarked upon however is the effect of those fairy tales on the form of the novel itself, particularly as those fairy tales collide with the Bildungsroman genre. Rather than reaffirming the telos-driven nature of both the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, Charlotte Brontë, through Jane as narrator and protagonist, questions the narrative finality of both genres through their combination. The resultant Bildungsroman actively eschews any potential ossification of Jane as she invents and reinvents herself in her narration and deployment of narrative forms. Rather than a singular finished figure at the end of the novel, Jane offers a spectrum of identities that continue to grow and change from their initial contexts.

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia
pp. 52-68 Author: Channah Damatov
Abstract:
Anne Brontë’s deliberate exposition in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of gendered violence as the consequence of the structurally embedded sexism in the Victorian patriarchal socio-legal system is a daring example of feminist critique that was ahead of its time. This article examines the afterlife of Brontë’s feminism in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016), a neo-Victorian domestic noir thriller which re(dis)covers and repurposes Brontë’s novel for contemporary women readers. Baker uncovers the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and sexism in professional spheres that persist despite the progress achieved by Western feminist movements to secure women’s rights in the last century. We argue that The Woman Who Ran demonstrates just how generative Anne Brontë’s writing remains for conceptualising feminist issues in the twenty-first century.

Anti-Hierarchical Development in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey
pp. 69-82 Author: Amanda Auerbach
Abstract:
This article offers an allegorical interpretation of the ostensibly realist elements of Anne Brontë’s 1847 novel Agnes Grey. Read non-allegorically, Agnes Grey appears to depict the triumph of the governess Agnes’s moral will over her desires that conflict with her duties, as occurs in the Bildungsroman. But the novel can also be seen as using Agnes’s evolving relationship with her pupils to consider the ideal way to prioritise and respond to the various impulses of the self and various members of a social community. The plot can then be seen as progressing towards the anti-hierarchical model of self and community that Brontë deems most ethical. This community largely corresponds to Talia Schaffer’s community of care.

Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë
pp. 83-98 Author: Julie Elizabeth Young
Abstract:
As a solitary mention within her juvenilia tale ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829), Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious reference to air balloon flight suggests a wider social and literary context for its author’s understanding of this new scientific phenomenon. This article examines the wider textual presence of this awe-inspiring invention and how her seemingly simple reference to balloons ultimately aligns her from an early age to a wider, Romantic female discourse, particularly to the writing of Mary Shelley. The prevalent references to balloon flight in newspapers, magazines and books available to Brontë at the time, imply a familiarity with these dialogues, which is ultimately suggestive of the material she read and was subsequently inspired by to include in her own writing. Brontë’s reference to balloons associates her work with a Romantic discourse contemporary to her, specifically a female one, which situates her as a young writer alert to the literary dialogue of the time, hinting at a style she would later use in her novels, one which juxtaposed scientific invention in the Industrial Age beside an emotive poetic voice.

Penistone Crags, Ponden Kirk and the Fairies of Wuthering Heights
pp. 99-115 Author: Simon Young
Abstract:
Penistone Crags in Wuthering Heights (1847) has long and, I argue, correctly been identified with Ponden Kirk on Haworth Moor. This article compares the folklore of Ponden Kirk with the fictional folklore associated with Penistone Crags, looking at the real-world and literary traditions in relation to beliefs surrounding the South Pennines. It suggests that some details of fairylore in Wuthering Heights—both the fairies in the ‘Fairy Cave’ and Catherine’s elf-bolts—are based on early to mid-nineteenth-century Haworth folklore. The article finishes with an appendix on the Gytrash (a legendary being familiar from Jane Eyre).

Symbolic Meanings of Violets in Villette
pp. 116-128 Author: Miwa Uhara
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë bestows symbolic meanings in her novels on some of the vegetation based on their popular meanings and images, and she would have expected contemporary readers to know the meanings of such vegetation. Villette (1853) is marked by the symbolical use of violets. Supported by the image of violets from the language of flowers that was popular in nineteenth-century Britain, this article explores several meanings at play in Brontë’s symbolic use of violets. Firstly, she uses a violet to contrast Paulina’s beauty with Ginevra’s. Secondly, M. Paul Emanuel also communicates his messages through violets. Thirdly, Lucy Snowe reminds us of Lucy Gray from Wordsworth’s poems because both women are associated with violets. And finally, M. Paul is linked to violets to both accentuate his Napoleonic characteristics and to symbolise his short life, evoking Hamlet. They imply his death and the end of his relationship with Lucy, an ending which is not clearly described at the end of the novel.

All true histories contain instruction’: Truth and Everyday Heroism in Agnes Grey
pp. 129-138 Author: Rosa Ortiz Notario
Abstract:
The writings of the Brontës have frequently been studied in relation to conceptions of heroism. More specifically, critics have focused on the influence of war heroes such as the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon in the early writings of the siblings, principally those authored by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë. This article, however, explores the conception of ‘everyday heroism’ in Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey (1847). It argues that the ordinary characters portrayed in Brontë’s work embody qualities usually associated with the heroic. Further, the analysis of heroism can reveal new insights into the representation of gender roles and class relations in the novel.

Editorial - Reviews Section

Editorial. Reviews Section
p 139-140 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer

Book Reviews

The Brontë Society Conference, The Brontës and the Wild, 9 September 2023

pp 141-144 Author: Rose Dawn Gant

Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing, Women of the Wild, 22–24 September 2023

pp. 145-146 Author: Rose Dawn Gant

Wuthering Heights directed by Bryan Ferriter

pp. 146-148 Author: Patsy Stoneman

Oblivion: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë: A Novel in Three Volumes

Related Articles

pp. 148-150 Author: Bob Duckett

The Novelist of Wildfell Hall: A New Life of Anne Brontë
pp 150-153 Author: Bob Duckett

Caldebroc
pp 153-155 Author: Tony Williams

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

pp 155-156 Author: Sarah Powell

Walking with Anne Brontë, Insights and Reflections: An Anthology

pp 156-159 Author: Peter Cook

Announcements

Call for Articles: Brontë Studies Special Issue: The Brontës and the Wild

pp 160-161

Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize

pp 162-163

Brontë Studies is pleased to invite submissions for the 2024 iteration of the Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize. The prize aims to encourage new scholarship in the field of Brontë studies, recognise and reward outstanding achievement by new researchers, and support the professional development of the next generation of Brontë scholars.

The prize was established in honour of Margaret Smith. She remains one of the most important Brontë scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As well as (co-)editing scholarly editions of Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and The Professor, and co-editing The Oxford Companion to the Brontës with Christine Alexander, Smith is widely regarded for her field-defining volumes of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (1995, 2000, 2005). Alongside numerous other publications and contributions to the Brontë Society, Smith published many original articles and reviews in Brontë Studies over the years. Her minutely researched, comprehensive and scrupulous work will continue to be an indispensable resource and inspiration for current and future generations of Brontë scholars.