(2021). Editorial. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, The Brontës: Sickness, Contagion, Isolation, pp. 97-101.

This article argues that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were well apprised of the sanitary science of their day and incorporated it into their fiction through the ethical models they derived by drawing on this science. Using the Babbage report as an entry point for exploring the world views that characterised both Haworth and London at the time, this article explores one novel by each sister. Ultimately

The Brontё family experienced much illness, both within and without their family. Disease in the nineteenth century was omnipresent. In 1831, a new threat appeared throughout the world — Asiatic Cholera. As the world in 2020 has been severely affected and constrained by the Coronavirus, our work and personal lives have changed drastically. What impact might the Asiatic Cholera, similarly swift in its

Emily Brontë was famously reclusive. In the eighteen months she spent away from home during her short life she was deeply unhappy, and at Roe Head and Law Hill she was distressed enough to become physically ill. Whilst Emily’s ‘social distancing’ was her own decision as opposed to one imposed by government, there are intriguing parallels between her seclusion and our own experience of enforced isolation

This article explores the transformation of violence in religiously inflected representations of mental pain in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). Through the appropriation of the Old Testament narrative of Jael and Sisera (Judges 4), Brontë presents vivid, embodied re-enactments of Lucy Snowe’s psychological suffering and self-harm. These representations of self-inflicted pain provide a complex picture

This article analyses the symbiotic relationship between Lucy Snowe’s madness and isolation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). I argue that madness enhances isolation, and isolation enhances madness, through an exploration of Lucy’s solitude. In the novel, Lucy endures enforced isolation as a treatment for madness, while she chooses other voluntary forms of isolation, such as the natural world

This article considers the practice of care and the ethics embedded therein as represented in Villette, focusing on Lucy Snowe’s caring relationship with Miss Marchmont. The episode presents a remarkable narrative of suffering, healing and redemption in which the human experience of caring and being cared for is highlighted. Care, intrinsically relational, involves a complex cognitive, affective and

This article revisits Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) in light of current debates surrounding illness and caregiving by asking: how can feminist ethics of care illuminate the place of characters with disabilities within cultures of self-reliance and self-sufficiency? By drawing on critical care ethics, I argue that caregiving communities engage more central characters into the peripheral narrative

William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) presents a recognisable Brontëan cinematic language that invites comparison between its protagonist, Katherine Lester, and Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights (1847). Whilst Earnshaw’s self-deprivation mirrors her struggle for a disembodied self that transcends her gendered body, Oldroyd’s Katherine uses her appetite to colonise her household

Tuberculosis killed five of the Brontë siblings, and yet neither Patrick nor Charlotte Brontë succumbed to it. Was this simply a matter of luck, or had Charlotte and her father developed immunity to the infectious, and frequently fatal, disease? By examining their lives and backgrounds we will determine whether tuberculosis immunity is likely to be the reason that Patrick and Charlotte Brontë escaped

(2021). Statement of Retraction: Female Education as a Theme in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, The Brontës: Sickness, Contagion, Isolation, pp. 223-223.

(2021). Editorial. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

Though the Romantic lineage of Emily Brontë’s works has been identified by critics, the post-Romantic feature of her writings remains to be further explored. By focusing on the representation of a cardinal concept in Romanticism — the Romantic imagination – in Emily Brontë’s poems, this article seeks to explore the transformation of Romanticism in Emily’s world. It aims to present a detailed analysis

A careful reading of Wuthering Heights shows that, notwithstanding the grimness permeating its various narratives, there are elements in the text which may be said to be of essentially comic interest. That Emily Brontë seems to have no mean gift for comedy is apparent enough, say, through Joseph’s witty utterances; through the satirical portrait of the housekeeper Zillah; through the silly things said

This essay explores how the contemporary English filmmaker Andrea Arnold invents a queer ecological aesthetic to adapt Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights in her 2011 film by the same title. A queer ecological aesthetic combines queer, ecofeminist and postcolonial approaches to disavow the institutional and cultural ways in which white heterosexist patriarchy ‘sexualizes’ nature and ‘naturalizes’

This essay reads ‘Currer Bell’ as an important alternative name for Jane Eyre which helped to convey an ambiguous sense of authorship and genre to the public at its initial publication. Through a close analysis of its discursive and narrative function, this essay will demonstrate how ‘Currer Bell’ worked as a curious name that helped to construct ambiguous subjectivities for both Charlotte Brontë and

A study of motherhood in Charlotte Brontë’s novels cannot be considered complete without addressing the importance of matrilineal bonds in her first novel, The Professor. Although the figure of the mother is present throughout the novel, this aspect has barely received any critical attention. Both main characters, William Crimsworth and Frances Henri, are shown actively to seek re-encounters with the

This article discusses Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley as a response to ‘The Hill and the Valley’, one of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy. Whereas ‘The Hill and the Valley’ is informed by a belief that following the rules of political economy can solve all social problems of the day, Shirley, for all its similarities to Martineau’s novella, reflects different, less unambiguously affirmative

This short paper looks again at an intriguing pattern in Charlotte Brontë’s imagining of corvids in Jane Eyre (1847), suggesting that these creatures are indications of a particular, and very probably unconscious, imaginative habit in the novel. The birds appear in the text at crucial moments as if they are closely associated in Charlotte’s mind with important turns in the plot. The end of the paper

(2021). Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 88-90.

(2021). The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writing. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 90-92.

(2021). History of English Literature, Volume 5: Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction, 1832–1870. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 92-93.

(2021). Glass Town [A Graphic Novel] Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 93-95.

(2021). Rereading Jane Eyre: A Personal Retrospective. Brontë Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 95-96.