Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In both her life and her art, Charlotte Brontë was alive to the difficulty of responding to attacks that are denied or underacknowledged, so that any defense risks seeming defensive in our modern sense of the word: too quick to take offense or covertly aggressive. For some, Brontë's novels are deformed by hunger, rebellion, and rage; for others, they are deformed by the repression of these feelings. Both views ignore hunger, rebellion, and rage as powerful resources for Brontë's art rather than as personal difficulties to be surmounted or even deplored. Janet Gezari reassesses Charlotte Brontë's achievement by showing the ways in which an embodied defensiveness is central to both the novels and their author's life. She argues that Brontë's novels explore the complex relations between accommodation and resistance in the lives of those who find themselves—largely for reasons of class and gender—on the defensive. Gezari rehabilitates the concept of defensiveness by suggesting that there are circumstances in which defensive conduct is both appropriate and creditable. The emphasis on a different kind of bodily experience in each novel identifies Brontë's specific social concerns in the text; and the kinds of self-defenses at issue in it. This book arrives in the wake of renewed critical interest in Charlotte Brontë, especially on the part of feminist critics. They have substantially revised our understanding of Jane Eyre and Villette, but there have been few studies of The Professor and Shirley, and few book-length studies of Charlotte Brontë's work as a whole. Although Gezari's book is not a biography, she also seeks to revise our sense of Brontë's life by turning attention from its familiar romantic circumstances—the bleakness of the Yorkshire moors and unrequited love—to its less familiar practical circumstances—her struggles as a woman of a certain class and a publishing author. They reveal a woman more embattled, contentious, and resilient, though no less passionate, than the more familiar trembling soul.

Sara Lodge offers a lively introduction to the critical history of one of the most widely-studied nineteenth-century novels, from the first reviews through to present day responses. The Guide also includes sections devoted to feminist, Marxist and postcolonial criticism of Jane Eyre, as well as analysis of recent developments.

Examining a wide range of representations of physical, metaphorical, and dream landscapes in Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Eithne Henson explores the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of landscape as the human body and in ideas of nature. Henson discusses the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, particularly on Brontë and Eliot, and argues that Ruskinian aesthetics, Darwinism, and other scientific preoccupations of an industrializing economy, changed constructions of landscape in the later nineteenth century. Henson examines the conventions of reading landscape, including the implied expectations of the reader, the question of the gendered narrator, how place defines the kind of action and characters in the novels, the importance of landscape in creating mood, the pastoral as a moral marker for readers, and the influence of changing aesthetic theory on the implied painterly models that the three authors reproduce in their work. She also considers how each writer defines the concept of Englishness against an internal or colonial Other. Alongside these concerns, Henson interrogates the ancient trope that equates woman with nature, and the effect of comparing women to natural objects or offering them as objects of the male gaze, typically to diminish or control them. Informed by close readings, Henson's study offers an original approach to the significances of landscape in the 'realist' nineteenth-century novel.

This stimulating study of Charlotte Brontë's novels draws on extensive original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women's day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context. Through a close consideration of the ways in which Brontë's novels engage with the thinking of their time, it offers a powerful argument for the "literary" as a distinctive mode of intelligence, and reveals a Charlotte Brontë more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be. The study will be of interest not only to students of Victorian literature and society, but also to those literary critics and theorists who are beginning to reconsider the nature of the aesthetic and its relation to ideology.

Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

The essays in this collection examine women in diverse roles; mother, socialite, prostitute, celebrity, medical practitioner and patient. The wide range of commentators allows a diverse picture of women’s health in this period.

Presents a collection of nine critical essays about the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

A Companion to the Brontës brings the latest literary research and theory to bear on the life, work, and legacy of the Brontë family. Includes sections on literary and critical contexts, individual texts, historical and cultural contexts, reception studies, and the family’s continuing influence Features in-depth articles written by well-known and emerging scholars from around the world Addresses topics such as the Gothic tradition, film and dramatic adaptation, psychoanalytic approaches, the influence of religion, and political and legal questions of the day – from divorce and female disinheritance, to worker reform Incorporates recent work in Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and race and gender studies

The extraordinary works of the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have entranced and challenged scholars, students, and general readers for the past 150 years. This Companion offers a fascinating introduction to those works, including two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century - Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. In a series of original essays, contributors explore the roots of the sisters' achievement in early nineteenth-century Haworth, and the childhood 'plays' they developed; they set these writings within the context of a wider history, and show how each sister engages with some of the central issues of her time. The essays also consider the meaning and significance of the Brontës' enduring popular appeal. A detailed chronology and guides to further reading provide further reference material, making this a volume indispensable for scholars and students, and all those interested in the Brontës and their work.

Rosemary J. Mundhenk and LuAnn McCracken Fletcher have assembled a remarkable variety of Victorian nonfiction prose, both classic and lesser known. In both their commentary and selection the editors have drawn upon the insights of recent theoretical approaches to literature and culture to present a complex range of responses to Victorian issues, thus inviting modern readers to explore the many voices of the period and reenvision the Victorian era.