The Brontes

This seminar offers intensive study of the works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte—the most famous family in English literary history.  We’ll mainly focus on their novels: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  But we’ll also take a look at their lyric poetry—particularly that of Emily—and the juvenilia, particularly the “Angria” saga of Charlotte and her brother Bramwell.

From their childhood, the Brontes experienced writing as a collaborative activity, which is one important rationale for studying them together.  But while the biographical context is important, biographical criticism can be deeply reductive.  Hence our point of departure will be the contemporary reception of the three writers, who for all their differences struck their early readers as deeply unconventional—socially, morally, generically—and even downright dangerous.  (Even Jane Eyre, easily the most popular of the novels, was denounced in one famous review as an attack on the entire British way of life.)  Readers were especially struck by the violence of the language and passions expressed in the works—a response amplified by the discovery that the authors were young unmarried women.  What should me make of such passion?  What does it tell us about the social worlds of the novels, and particularly the situation of young women within them?  How might it be connected to social class, and to political struggles bound up with class and gender and ethnicity?  What is the place of religious faith in the novels, particularly in relation to romantic desire?   How does the experience and expression of vehement emotion shape the construction of literary character, and more generally of novelistic form?

Our readings will be supplements by some important critical accounts of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  It’s a measure of the significance of these works that they have figured centrally in the development of (inter alia) feminist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial literary criticism.