Abstract
Many who study the Brontës still do not read the Angrian fiction, despite the fact that it forms a body of work larger than all their published novels combined and that reading only those published novels means joining their fictive practice quite late: Charlotte was 30 by the time she ventured into print. There are various reasons for this relative neglect. Until recently, it was difficult to access the early work of Charlotte and Branwell in a format that lent itself to sustained reading.1 The tiny ‘books’ in which they wrote were, indeed, deliberately designed to make this writing ‘secret’: its manuscript format and insider narratives, while they minutely mimic the appearance of published texts, are purposely designed for a private rather than a public audience. The early work is discontinuous and potentially confusing: it consists of dialogues, reviews, plays, histories, poetry and stories. The Angrian narratives form episodes – like those of a soap opera – in an on- going drama with a large, inter- related cast of characters, many of whom go by several different names. As Sally Shuttleworth remarks, Charlotte’s Angrian tales have often also been politely overlooked due to the ‘common misapprehension that all her early writing takes place amidst exotic climes in a heady atmosphere of emotional intensity’.2
‘I am a sailor. Captain Arthur Fitz- Arthur, commander of the Formidable, one hundred guns. Your Lordship is Miss Jessy Heathcote.’
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Notes
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 101.
Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 40– 41.
Charlotte Brontë, Tales of Angria, ed. Heather Glen (London: Penguin, 2006 ), p. 238.
Carol Bock, Charlotte Brontë and the Storyteller’s Audience (University of Iowa Press, 1992), p. 102.
The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Christine Alexander (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), vol. 1, p. 6.
The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Christine Alexander (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) vol. 2, p. 19.
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities:Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 2.
Patricia Ingham, Authors in Context: The Brontës (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 154.
Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë:The Self Conceived (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 142– 143.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago, 1978), p. 118. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ), p. 78.
Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 98. Such feminist discontents also inform reading of novels by Emily and Anne. Linda Shires, in ‘Of Maenads, Mothers, and Feminized Males: Victorian Readings of the French Revolution’, in Shires, ed., Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1992) argues of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that Gilbert Markham is ‘feminized’ and is more of a spoilt son to Helen Graham than a lover: ‘One is left grateful that Helen loses her first husband to death, but left wondering whether… she is better married at all.’
Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth- Century Women’s Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Patricia Ingham, The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel ( London and NY: Routledge, 1996 ), p. 52.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights ( London: Penguin, 1985 ), p. 283.
Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979 ).
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© 2015 Sara Lodge
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Lodge, S. (2015). Masculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontës. In: Mallett, P. (eds) The Victorian Novel and Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491541_1
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