Description
Book SynopsisCharlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë’s legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author’s diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Trade Review‘To remind oneself of just how provisional even the most "definitive" treatments of Brontë's life and work inevitably turn out to be, you have only to turn to Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives, edited by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Here you will find an account of the dizzyingly varied ways in which scholars and creative practitioners have metabolized Brontë's work in the decades since her death before returning it to the world, transformed.’
Kathryn Hughes, TLS January 2018
‘The book begins with a scrupulous and detailed account of actual and conjectural pictures of Brontë … I cannot think of another artist whose appearance has received so much attention. What is the difference between the continuing life of works of art and the continuing life of an artist? What difference does it make to that continuing life when the artist is a woman? … Most of the essays in part 1 focus on the “afterlife” part of this collection, and are thoughtful, scholarly, and consistently attentive to what it now means to study a Victorian cult writer in relation to the history of her reception and to contemporary concerns.’
Janet Gezari, Connecticut College, Victorian Studies, Volume 61, Number 1, Autumn 2018
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: picturing Charlotte Brontë – Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne
Part I: Ghostly afterlives: cults, literary tourism and staging the life
1 The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf – Deborah Wynne
2 The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration, and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor – Jude Piesse
3 Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels – Charlotte Mathieson
4 Reading the revenant in Charlotte Brontë’s literary afterlives: charting the path from the ‘silent country’ to the seance – Amber Pouliot
5 Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed – Amber K. Regis
Part II: Textual legacies: influences and adaptations
6 ‘Poetry as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife – Anna Barton
7 The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing – Emma Liggins
8 Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette – Benjamin Poore
9 The ethics of appropriation; or, the ‘mere spectre’ of Jane Eyre: Emma Tennant’s Thornfield Hall, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights – Alexandra Lewis
10 ‘The insane Creole’: the afterlife of Bertha Mason – Jessica Cox
11 Jane Eyre’s transmedia lives – Monika Pietrzak-Franger
12 ‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre – Louisa Yates
Appendix: Charlotte Brontë's cultural legacy, 1848–2016 – Kimberley Braxton
Index
