Volume Introduction

Abstract

8 Victorians Journal Volume Introduction This year has seen a plethora of good new work on the Brontes. Clare Harman’s biography, Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart, tells Bronte’s story powerfully once again to a new audience. The Bronte Parsonage hosted numerous celebratory events, including an international conference centering on Victorian women’s issues held in Manchester, at which Bronte scholars Christine Alexander and Sally Shuttleworth spoke, in company with biographer Clare Harman and feminist writer Germaine Greer. Renowned Bronte juvenilia scholar Alexander and emerging scholar Sara L. Pearson co-wrote Celebrating Charlotte Bronte: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre, under the aegis of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, a beautiful and wonderfully useful book that connects the material objects ofCharlotte Bronte’s life with the novel Jane Eyre. The exhibit Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will, held at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City (Sept. 9,2016—Jan. 2,2017), continues to draw crowds ofBronte readers; the exhibition catalogue, The Brontes: A Family Writes, by Christine Nelson is a beautiful, informative book. If anyone imagined that no more could be said about Charlotte Bronte’s work, they must have been pleasantly surprised when many volumes were published this year, full of profound and illuminating insights into Bronte’s life, writings, and visual art. From collections on the influence of her early Angrian writings upon her mature work' and themed volumes1 2 to compendiums that include new essays on all the Brontes (including Branwell and Patrick),3 the fascination with the Brontes’ lives and work continues unabated into the twenty-first century. This volume of essays continues longstanding debates while exploring original avenues ofresearch and opening new areas ofdiscussion. The germinal work ofKaren Chase in Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in the Works of 1 Charlotte Brontefrom the Beginnings: Xew Essaysfrom the Juvenilia to the Major Works, edited by Lucy Morrison and Judith Pike (Routledge 2016). 2 See Time. Space, andPlace in Charlotte Bronte, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (July 2016). 3 See The Blackwell Companion to the Brontes, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (May 2016); Charlotte Bronte: Legacies andAfterlives, ed. Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne (Manchester LIP 2016); The Brontes andthe Idea ofthe Hitman: Science. Ethics, & the Imagination, ed. Alexandra Lewis (forthcoming Cambridge, April 2017). Victorians Journal 9 Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and of Sally Shuttleworth in Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology into Bronte’s knowledge of mental disorders strongly influences this volume, beginning with the opening essay by Diane Long Hoeveler. Hoeveler builds on Chase’s insights into Bronte’s imagining of mind and the representation ofemotion and personality as having its roots in Angria. Chase herself offers an essay in this volume that takes her critique in new directions as she reads Bronte’s fiction in light ofthe “domestic uncanny.” Chase’s focus upon narrative structure and literary genre is also the center of Ezra Feldman’s paper on “Weird Weather.” Another complex of issues in Charlotte Bronte scholarship focuses on gender, including articles by Beverly Taylor, Richard Kaye, Laura Struve, Anthony D’Agostino, Susan Taylor, and Kimberley Dimitriadis. Some essays revisit old discourses—Marie-Antoinette Smith (religious pilgrimage) and Patrick Fessenbecker (philosophy)—while others interrogate such vibrantly emerging scholarly discourses as the significance ofhands (Kimberly Cox), astronomy and science (Dimitriadis), and the poetics of“weird” texts (Feldman). What follows is a precis of each essay, offered with the intention of helping readers begin with their most passionate Brontean interests. Our hope is that readers will go on to engage with all of these fine essays. The breadth and depth ofthis work will be evident to all who read this new scholarship, and we are honored to have been chosen as editors of this volume dedicated to the wonderful Bronte scholar, the late Diane Long Hoeveler. Reader, we miss her. ft************** Diane Long Hoeveler, in her theoretically complex essay “Charlotte Bronte’s Oeuvre as Fantasy Fiction,” argues that at the center ofBronte’s “early works, as well as her later mature novels, is a type of fantasy writing, for all ofthese works attempt to accomplish the cultural and personal work that lies at the heart...