The Works of the Brontë Sisters

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change. This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts. This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

A brief discussion paper is offered on a largely undocumented subject related to the Methodist background of the Branwell and Carne clan of West Cornwall. These are the maternal relations of the Bronte writers of Yorkshire, and covers the period when increasingly the Wesleyan Methodists were pulling away from the Church of England.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel published under the masculine nom de plume Currer Bell, chronicles the coming-of-age story of a poor early 19th-century girl turned governess. Charlotte Bronte uses stylistic devices such as analogy, imagery, and synecdoche to portray the book’s central theme: Jane is like a caged bird who wants to find her wings within the oppressive, patriarchal culture of her time period. The novel was written when Bronte was still young enough to remember the passions of her own youth and shares many similar occurrences with the author’s own life, such as the loss of her mother, attending boarding school where she lost loved ones to illness and falling in love (or what some might call unhealthy infatuation) with an older man she could not have. It is this pain of her doomed affection for married writing instructor, Constantin Heger, which can be seen within the emotional opaqueness of Jane as she reflects on her journey to becoming Rochester’s wife. Coming from a poor background and family hardship to be a writer at a time when females were no more than accessories, the author’s frustration at her limiting time period can also be seen throughout the novel. Across the story, Jane finds her own identity and happiness through her interactions with her school, her father’s family, and Mr. Rochester.

The Brontë Sisters 200 Years: Biographical and Fictional Universes

Volume (to commemorate Brontë 200) on the reception, translation of the Brontë  sisters's work in Portugal, and on the biographical and fictional universes of the authors.
Published by the Portuguese National Library.

Review on Hoeveler's "Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës" (1998), a work which explores the notion that she labelled as "gothic feminism" while analysing several novels by female gothic writers.

This dissertation joins the theoretical conversation about Jane Eyre by examining the relationship between femininity and abjection in the characters of Jane, Helen Burns and Bertha Mason. This work analyses the actions and reactions of these women to demonstrate the nature of the abject. As a whole, Kristeva and Bronte’s texts are united by feminist interpretations of women’s actions, and as a result this connection allows for an evaluation of how the abject is intertextually connected with Jane Eyre. This dissertation, therefore, incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives as well as contextually significant readings of Bronte and Kristeva. The correspondence between religion, the human body and death are assessed in this dissertation in three chapters, which examine how these Kristevian concepts can be extracted from Bronte’s text despite their historical separation. This dissertation finds that alternative versions of femininity test patriarchal order in Jane Eyre, and Kristeva’s theory of abjection offers an explanation for how the abject affects this. Consequently, the relevance of the findings in this piece contribute to the theoretical debate surrounding Jane Eyre, by offering the combination of a feminist and Kristevian reading of the text.

This article scrutinises what generations of readers have perceived to be Wuthering Heights’ “general air of sour hatred” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 260) and its disconcerting density of violent and abusive exchanges. Taking up readings of the novel as a story of anti-colonial retaliation (Heathcliff) and feminist portrayal (Catherine; Isabella), I focus on Brontë’s affective politics in (re-)producing and channelling negative feeling in and beyond the text. In so doing, I follow an approach that I call ‘follow the hatred’ which is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s research on the ‘politics of emotion’ (2014; 2004) and, particularly, the ‘fantasy of violation’ (Ahmed 44). Utilising Ahmed’s understanding of emotions as based on processes of attribution that are structured by power relations, I trace Wuthering Heights’s instalment of Heathcliff as a source of hatred—a hatred that gradually infects all relationships and characters in the novel and, not least through occasional hints at romance, seamlessly blends in with mid-nineteenth century boundary panic regarding miscegenation and inverted colonial hierarchies. Illuminating also how the novel sets incentives for readers to feel within these parameters, the analysis shows how Brontë installs Heathcliff as an expansive force of injury and (emotional) infection with a particular effect: consolidating white English, particularly female, identities. Over two main sections—“Heathcliff’s Hatred” and “Catherine’s Liberation”—I thus go beyond popular readings of Heathcliff as either aggressor or underdog, instead offering new insights into how ‘feeling negatively’ is indebted to literary production, tying in with both writing and reading in an age of imperialism.

Abstract: Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering Heights, delineate the norms Brontë shares with her projected audience, analyze her divided impulses, and explain the generic forms in which those impulses manifest themselves. Brontë herself presupposes a folk understanding of human nature in her audience.

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change. This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts. This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

This thesis argues that there are parallels between the situation of women today and Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette (1853). Based on reception studies, feminist theory and an historically informed close reading of the novel, my ambition has been to explore how Villette has been received by Victorian and 20th-century critics, as well as to examine the text- internal factors that may have contributed to the novel’s continued appeal. In addition to this I have wanted to understand how it is being read today. Although readers’ horizons of expectation have changed since Villette was published, many features of the reception remain conspicuously similar. The novel’s reception shows that the predicament women have found themselves in as ‘the Other’ remains fundamentally stable. Due to new digital resources that give access to ordinary readers’ responses, this thesis presents fresh insights into the modern readers’ experiences of reading Villette. This thesis argues that the novel provides a female perspective that women in particular can relate to: they are able to identify with Lucy’s double and ambiguous self in their own battle for self-definition.

The thesis aims to explore the position of women in the Victorian era, particularly with regard to marriage, and to see how this is reflected in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë. The theoretical part explores the legal and social situation of women in the early nineteenth century and the practical part firstly analyses the novels separately to see how both authors reflect the realities that women of the era were facing. The last section of the practical part offers the overall comparison of the two chosen novels and examines differences and similarities in the central messages and in the final achievement of independence, equality, and justice.

This paper provides a detailed reading of Charlotte Brontë's first-person narrative in her novel 'Villette.' This paper argues that the protagonist, the unreliable narrator Lucy Snowe, employs selective omission, deceptive tactics, ambiguity and performance in order to hide her true self from other characters and the readers. These methods ultimately allow Snowe to maintain autonomy and authority in the telling of her own story, leaving us to only guess at who she really is.

Tre donne, nate agli inizi dell’Ottocento, rimaste orfane di madre molto giovani, allevate nella canonica del padre, in mezzo alla brughiera desolata dello Yorkshire, tre sorelle che rappresentano un caso straordinario nella storia della letteratura, le Brontë furono tutte scrittrici di romanzi di successo. Charlotte, la più grande, fu quella tra di loro che si spinse più oltre, nel mondo. Emily, pienamente soddisfatta e appagata dal suo mondo interiore, non chiedeva altro. Anne, l’idealista, avrebbe voluto riformare la società, a partire dalle mura di casa. Ognuna a suo modo, cercò, con pazienza e sacrificio, di entrare in relazione col proprio spirito creativo. Dotate di un talento naturale seppero coltivarlo, mai indifferenti all’indescrivibile chiamata interiore verso un ritorno alla totalità, verso il Sé.

Since 1695, the Lord Wharton Bible Charity has bestowed distinctive Bibles and two religious books to Yorkshire children able to recite certain Psalms and the catechism. Evidence for the Brontë' siblings' familiarity with the chari-ty's project includes their respective literary criticism of the misuse of rote Scrip-tural memorization and quoting and the presence of two Wharton Bibles owned by the Brontës in the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library. Descriptions of the charity's project appear in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), representing the catalyst for Catherine and Heathcliff 's growing alienation and resistance to Christianity. THE LORD WHARTON BIBLE CHARITY, established in 1695 exclusively for the County of Yorkshire by Nonconformist Lord Philip Wharton, encouraged rote memorization of Scripture and catechism for local children. While their guardians received a small financial reward for successful instruction, Yorkshire children reciting certain psalms from memory would receive a unique Bible and two classic works of Christian doctrine. Although this charity is still operational to a lesser extent, its long-term impact on generations of York-shire children generally passes unnoticed, except for brief mentions in histories of British

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was a novelist of extraordinary power who introduced into English literature a new tone of anguished passion coupled with an urgent sense of deprivation and abandonment. Charlotte and her younger sisters Emily and Anne are unique in the history of English literature in their status as the only three children from one family who have all written great English novels. Charlotte, Anne, and their brother Branwell also wrote fine poetry, and Emily was a brilliant poet. The dramatic emotional power of the Bronte sisters' work, the originality of their genius, and the suffering and tragedy of their brief lives has won them passionate readers who are as devoted to knowing the sisters' history as to studying their art. As Marianne Thormählen states, the scholarly insistence as well upon imbricating the Brontës' lives and work is a part of " the uniqueness of the Bronte phenomenon " (Introduction, The Brontës in Context, 2012, 1). Their novels have inspired an unrivalled number of homage works in fiction, theater, film, poetry, and music and are translated and read all over the world today. The Brontës' home at Haworth Parsonage has become a museum that is visited by thousands of pilgrims each year.

If you are expecting that Emily Brontë is going to unleash a fairy tale in her novel Wuthering Heights , you are going to be disappointed. In her only novel, Brontë has woven the sombre tale of two generations of people. I find her rendering of the dark passages of the human mind in the novel fascinating. It is a love story painted with the dark tones. Brontë reminds us of the Ancient Greek literature where unbridled emotions are displayed. Wuthering Heights is the representative novel of the dark. This novel tells the story of some unlikable characters. I may sound paradoxical but I like them for being unlikable.

Published in 1847, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights had blown up a storm in the quiet reservoir of literature of its time. Queen Victoria was the ruler of Britain back then. People abided by rules, tradition and conventions. Being an unconventional work of literature, Brontë's only novel offers a display of primal emotions, violence and revenge, that left the readers and critics of the time bewildered. The novel is marked as one of gothic tradition, because of the dark ambience of the novel, presence of ghosts and wild temper of most of the characters. Some characters and the writer herself have remained a puzzle to rest of the world.

This article examines the theological message of Jane Eyre, challenging the view that it is a narrative that is concerned with the emasculation of Rochester, and arguing that the novel has a profoundly orthodox theological message that is embedded in the references to idolatry and worship of people (and, in particular, Jane). The novel argues that right-ordered relationships between men and women should not get in the way of the worship of God. The article explores, too, the messianic roles that different men,women and children take within the novel, or are forced to take, and the dysfunction that this signifies.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the English language. Its enduring interest, from both a popular and a scholarly viewpoint, has resulted in countless studies of the text from a variety of perspectives. Indeed, as its meaning and context shift depending on cultural and historical variables, the novel continues to demand frequent reinterpretation and new scholarship. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability is a breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre, the first to examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a disability studies perspective, offering fresh insight into Brontë’s classic nineteenth-century novel from a vantage that is of growing importance both academically and culturally. Grounded in Victorian studies, the book also draws on theory and criticism in disability and cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies.

One of the most successful partnerships in publishing began in 1925 when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer purchased The Modern Library from Horace Liveright. Cerf and Klopfer nurtured the series as it had never been, recouping their original $215,000 investment in less than two years. This would be nearly $3 million today. Successful, and beginning to bore with reprints, they decided to publish fine new books whenever they felt like it. The new venture: "Random House." Bennett Cerf admired Hamish Hamilton's work in the UK and struck a deal in 1936 for Hamilton to distribute the Modern Library, expanding the reach of the series and perhaps to compete directly with the Everyman Series and its imitators. The agreement included 25 titles published by Modern Library Hamilton believed had passed out of copyright in the UK. The titles they planned included the likes of Casanova's Memoirs, Pepys' Diary, The Three Musketeers, plenty of Charles Dickens and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change. This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts. This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

El motivo literario de la casa abandonada es una de las figuraciones más poderosas de la literatura moderna. En su declinación como casa encantada (haunted house, en la ficción anglófona), la imagen ha dado lugar a un amplio abanico de reflexiones sobre el significado cultural de los espacios espectrales. Debido a la fuerte conexión antropológica entre la casa y la identidad, una lectura sintomática de la imagen permite revelar ciertas tensiones en la articulación de las formaciones culturales periféricas. Este artículo analiza la imagen de la casa en algunos textos literarios y periodísticos de autores gallegos del siglo XIX hispánico (Manuel Murguía, Ventura Pueyo, Emilia Pardo Bazán y Rosalía de Castro), partiendo del establecimiento de un vínculo metafórico entre la casa y la lengua y/o dialecto. A fin de esclarecer el sentido de este vínculo en la ficción europea, se establece una comparación entre el corpus literario de Rosalía de Castro, particularmente las novelas Flavio y La hija del mar, y la novela Wuthering Heights, de Emily Brontë. El análisis muestra no sólo que la producción literaria de la periferia cultural entró reiteradamente en conflicto con la tendencia centralizadora del canon historiográfico español, sino también que la tensión cultural entre lo normativo y lo excéntrico dejó huellas profundas en el discurso literario europeo del siglo XIX.

The aim of this work is to study the influence of three aspects of Victorianism -- romanticism, religiosity and imagination -- upon the aesthetic means of representation of that time. The center of the investigation is the work of Charlotte Brontë, with special emphasis on the novel Jane Eyre. The thesis proposed is that the use of symbolic imagery solves the difficulty of coping with the simultaneous commitment to morality and passion that characterizes the Victorian times. This is an argumentative dissertation, divided into six chapters. Chapter one presents the procedures to be followed and introduces some information about Victorianism. Chapter two displays the review of bibliography and examines the workings of Victorian criticism. The three following chapters deal respectively with Romanticism, Religion and Imagination. In the conclusion we hope to validate the thesis proposed and, to some extent, reevaluate our current notions about Victorianism.

André Téchiné  nasce nel Sud-Ovest della Francia dove visse un’infanzia piuttosto provinciale che potremo definire di formazione-isolamento. Solitario e immerso nella sua ambizione cinematografica, negli anni della gioventù, egli si divide tra gli studi, la scrittura dei suoi primi articoli –  per il giornale del liceo La Plume et l’écran – e le domeniche pomeriggio trascorse in solitudine al cinema del villaggio. Questo semplice dato biografico di un’adolescenza appartata ci permette già di creare senza indugio una prima analogia con la vita delle sorelle Brontë ‘relegate’, malgrado la loro appassionata curiosità, ad Haworth, nella più profonda e austera provincia  inglese dello Yorkshire. L’autoformazione, l’isolamento e i primi tentativi di scrittura accomunano perciò entrambi i destini e fanno del senso di frustrazione, emarginazione e pregiudizio, il fulcro di un’intercomprensione biografica tra André Téchiné e le Brontë. In altre parole, l’autore condivide e percepisce senza alcuna oscurità l’universo intimo brontiano riuscendo a rievocare ne Les Sœurs Brontë , quella straordinaria sensibilità immaginifica che ne contraddistingue tuttora il genio. Téchiné, « […] annonce qu’il « imagine », et ce verbe, il le prend au pied de la lettre : il met en image, il donne à voir, constitue la scène et sollicite l’apparition. »  delle sorelle Brontë. La scrittura della sceneggiatura , insieme a Pascal Bonitzer, sembra quindi seguire, nella sua stesura, un particolare processo di immedesimazione speculare che filtra dalla profonda, quanto commovente, umanità condivisa che ne traspare. Infatti, le varie inquadrature scelte dal regista ci restituiscono una « […] réalité qui apparaît sur l’écran […] jamais totalement neutre mais toujours signe de quelque chose de plus, […] [une] dialectique signifiant-signifié […] »  legata a una visione soggettiva e sognata del racconto biografico.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway’s debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success?

Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture.

Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway’s debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

Reseña del libro de Mireia Munmany 'La gestió del patrimoni literari. Conceptualització i anàlisi comparativa dels models català i anglès'. Se trata de un estudio comparativo entre la gestión del patrimonio literario inglés y del patrimonio literario catalán, en el que se abordan los casos de Shakespeare, Woolf, Brontë, Jacint Verdaguer y Josep Pla.

With recent digital advancements, it is increasingly possible to question Charlotte Brontë's 1850 account of the instinctive process by which she and her sisters wrote their way into the British literary canon by exploring popular Georgian and early Victorian fiction for textual similarities to the 1847 novels. After being advised by publishers to consider readerly tastes catered to by British circulating libraries, Charlotte Brontë could consult such works at Haworth or Manchester-area circulating libraries while drafting her successful novel Jane Eyre (1847). Though, as the Victorian era approached, genres such as the silver fork novel were framed as inferior, largely intended by librarians for female reading, their undeniable popularity influenced publishing trends between 1825 and 1841 and afterwards remained a financial force at the circulating library despite attracting critical satire. Two anonymously published silver fork novels, The Coquette (1834) by Frederick Mansel Reynolds and The M.D.'s Daughter (1842) by Lady Harriet Anne Scott contain scenes and dialogue that appear to have been adapted by Charlotte to enliven the plot of Jane Eyre and ensure its publication, perhaps justifying George Henry Lewes' sagacious 1847 criticism of this English novel as evoking "the circulating library."

In 2012 the novel Jane Eyre was studied by a group of undergraduate English Literature students from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil. Negotiation was needed on the part of the teachers so that a number of reception issues could be managed and the experiment eventually be deemed successful. To set the tone of this exercise, the group borrowed a metaphor from Umberto Eco, and compared literature to some woodland where every reader can enter, provided they carry a rucksack. The better equipped the rucksack is, the longer the readers can stay in the woods. Therefore, the group determined to learn as much as possible about the historical and cultural aspects of Victorianism, so that they could carry heavier rucksacks and profit as much as possible from their journey, becoming well informed readers, capable of avoiding some of the culture gaps that inevitably occur. The aim of this paper, thus, is to retrace that reading journey, reporting the discoveries made and the hindrances met by the group, while examining the strategies used to move forward. Difficulties ranged from simple lack of current daily life knowledge (What does a horse chestnut tree look like? What does heather look like? What does a manor house look like?) to denser, more abstract matters. The central concern was the intriguing clash between the moralistic and romantic aspects of Victorianism. In what possible ways could the novel solve the unsolvable predicament of the protagonist, who pledges allegiance simultaneously to two irreconcilable masters, morality and passion? To solve this puzzle, the group used the theory of the Orders of the Image, by Gilbert Durand, as an aid. Special attention was paid to the symbolic images of the sun and the moon, here approached in connection to Celtic tradition. At the end of the work, the group construed an idea about a sort of dialectical movement performed by Brontë, which not only solved the protagonist's dilemma, but also contributed new stylistic resources to the development of the novel as a genre.

Did Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield’s engagement with,
and awareness of, each other influence their work? In Mansfield’s case,
the answer is a resounding yes. Her first collection of stories, In a German
Pension (1911), suggests von Arnim’s influence in its title and in the sub- 1
ject choice of several stories. In von Arnim’s case, the answer is rather less obvious. Mansfield famously denied influencing her cousin – ‘Never could Elizabeth be influenced by me.’2 Yet, von Arnim’s novel Vera, pub- lished in 1921 and written at the height of her friendship with Mansfield, offers an interesting comparison to Mansfield’s short stories ‘The Little Governess’ and, even more particularly, ‘Bliss’, first published in 1918. In this essay I establish fresh resonances between the work of Mansfield and von Arnim through their engagement with the writings of the Brontë sisters, particularly Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).