Charlotte Brontë

Legacies and afterlives

Editors:
Amber K. Regis
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Deborah Wynne
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This book charts the vast cultural impact of Charlotte Bronte since the appearance of her first published work, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It highlights the richness and diversity of the author's legacy, her afterlife and the continuation of her plots and characters in new forms. The most well known and well regarded of the three sisters during the Victorian period, Charlotte Bronte bequeathed a legacy which is more extensive and more complex than the legacies of Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte. The book shows how Bronte's cultural afterlife has also been marked by a broad geographical range in her consideration of Bronte-related literary tourism in Brussels. It is framed by the accounts of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, both of whom travelled to Yorkshire to find evidence of Charlotte Bronte's life and to assess her legacy as an author. The book focuses upon Bronte's topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of the friendship and correspondence with Mary Taylor. Recent works of fiction have connected the Brontes with the supernatural. The book explores Bronte biodrama as a critically reflexive art: a notable example of popular culture in dialogue with scholarship, heritage and tourism. The Professor and Jane Eyre house the ghost of an original verse composition, whose inclusion allows both novels to participate together in a conversation about the novel's capacity to embody and sustain a lyric afterlife. A survey of the critical fortunes of Villette is also included.

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Introduction
Introduction
Appendix
Appendix

 

‘To remind oneself of just how provisional even the most "definitive" treatments of Brontë's life and work inevitably turn out to be, you have only to turn to Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives, edited by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Here you will find an account of the dizzyingly varied ways in which scholars and creative practitioners have metabolized Brontë's work in the decades since her death before returning it to the world, transformed.'
Kathryn Hughes
TLS
January 2018

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