The 1916 centenary: Charlotte Brontë and first-wave feminism

Abstract

George Moore, writing for the Fortnightly Review in 1919, expressed relief that the “Bronte epidemic” had finally come to an end (148). He was no doubt referring to the flurry of articles and books following publication of Charlotte Bronte’s letters to Constantin Heger in the Times on July 29, 1913, and the centenary celebrations of her birth in 1916. Moore was not the only commentator who expressed fatigue over extensive press coverage of the Brontes’ lives and works. As early as 1912, William Axon remarked, “The Bronte literature grows with uncomfortable luxuriance, and it would be wise for the ‘experts’ to moderate their activities unless and until they have something of importance to say” (212). Axon’s use of scare quotes around “experts” is telling given that many significant monographs on the Brontes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written by women. Beginning with Agnes Mary Robinson’s Emily Bronte (1883), there was a steady stream of critical commentary, including Marion Harland’s Charlotte Bronte at Home (1899), May Byron’s A Day with Charlotte Bronte (1911), May Sinclair’s The Three Brontes (1912), Grace Milne Rae’s Thoughts from Charlotte Bronte Gathered from Her Novels (1912), Esther Chadwick’s In the Footsteps of the Brontes (1914), Frederika Macdonald’s The Secret of Charlotte Bronte (1914), and Maude Goldring’s Charlotte Bronte: The Woman (1915). In addition, Mary Augusta Ward wrote introductory essays to the Haworth edition of the Brontes’ works (1899-1900), and May Sinclair published introductions to the Everyman editions (1908-14). Added to this list were hundreds of essays by women published in periodicals and newspapers – for example, Katherine Tynan’s “The Real Charlotte” and Virginia Woolf’s “Charlotte Bronte,” which appeared in the Bookman and the Times Literary Supplement , respectively. Very few of these women were experts in Axon’s implied definition of the term: they were novelists or popular journalists rather than professors or high-culture critics.