Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination, by Simon Marsden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination by Simon Marsden, and: The Brontës in Context ed. by Marianne Thormählen, and: Law and the Brontës by Ian Ward Beth Newman (bio) Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination, by Simon Marsden; pp. 183. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, £60.00, £18.99 paper, $110.00, $29.95 paper. The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen; pp. xxxiv + 388. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, £69.99, £17.99 paper, $115.99, $27.99 paper. Law and the Brontës, by Ian Ward; pp. vi + 195. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £60.00, $100.00. Thanks to the work of the last quarter of the twentieth century culminating in Juliet Barker’s massive family biography The Brontës (1994), we have moved past the Brontë myth. Even Barker no longer feels compelled to fend off absolutely the discredited image of three naive spinsters who, despite being cut off from the main currents of Victorian life, produced some of the most impassioned and enduring novels of the nineteenth century. If she had, surely she would not have taken the surprising step of subtitling the second edition of her biography “Wild Genius on the Moors” (2013). The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen, provides a useful representative collection of post-Brontë-myth scholarship. Like the other volumes in Cambridge’s “Literature in Context” series, the book is intended for both academic and general readers. Its forty-two essays by thirty-six well-respected Brontë scholars, many of whom have elsewhere broken new ground, are lively and short, informative rather than interpretive. The first section includes biographical essays and addresses such topics as the correspondence, the juvenilia, and the path to publication. A shorter middle section quickly traces five periods of reception plus adaptations and translations. Seventeen more essays explore historical and cultural contexts. Much of the material will be familiar to scholars, but by no means all of it. The sheer number of essays makes it difficult to isolate highlights and surprises, but I’ll mention Stephen Colclough’s illuminating essay on the non-serial modes of distribution at first publication, Victor A. Neufeldt’s contribution about Branwell, and Stephen Prickett’s discussion of Julius and Augustus Hare’s Guesses at Truth (1827) as an introduction to the British intellectual world of the Brontës’ time. In post-Brontë-myth spirit, Michael Baumber confirms the accuracy of Charlotte’s characterization of Haworth and environs as a “remote district where education had made little progress,” though taken out of context it has contributed to the romantic picture of three visionaries writing in splendid isolation (16). And it’s refreshing to read Thormählen’s warning in her introduction about new myths springing up to replace the old. One of these, she notes, is a tendency now to see Charlotte as the bossy big sister who self-servingly misrepresented her younger siblings. She provides a moving and salutary defense of Charlotte as a grieving but courageous survivor, the family “doer” [End Page 111] whose unflagging determination while all three were alive secured their places in posterity (4). Overall the book is a pleasure to browse, a helpful guide to further reading, and a handy compendium in which answers to questions about, say, the extant Brontë portraits, or the various conjectured originals for Wuthering Heights, Thornfield, and the other houses are conveniently gathered together. Ian Ward, who contributed the collection’s essay on law, treats the subject more expansively in his Law and the Brontës. A law professor who has published widely on the field’s relation to literature, Ward explains that one oft-cited justification for such work is to awaken an “otherwise dormant ethical sensitivity” in lawyers and law students (3). Because the Brontës were writing domestic fiction about women living under the doctrine of coverture (and, in Heathcliff’s case, about the marginalization of bastards), considering their work alongside the relevant statute and case law can enable us to empathize with those who cannot make law but who nevertheless live, and often suffer, under its strictures. Many...