‘Poetry, as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife

This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

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

This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.

The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf

This chapter considers how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Brontë during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of CharlotteBrontë and Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘Haworth, 1904’, both writers assessing Brontë’s legacy as an author. While Gaskell’s biography unleashed the ‘Charlotte’ cult, whose devotees became instrumental in the establishment of the Brontë Society in 1893 and the eventual opening of the parsonage as a museum, Woolf pondered the negative impact of literary tourism on the legacy of writers. For decades after her death, literary tourists sought traces of Brontë’s ghostly presence in Haworth, initiating the creation of the parsonage as literary shrine and a tourist industry based on the notion of literary pilgrimage. Analysing a range of accounts of visits to Haworth, along with obituaries, this chapter argues that Brontë’s reputation was initially shaped by myths and misconceptions as much as by her literary works.

The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing

This chapter traces women writers’ reinterpretations and re-workings of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘feminist voice’ between 1910 and 1940, considering political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair’s The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street. These prominent inter-war literary writers are worth (re-)exploring for the ways in which they challenged and reconfigured assumptions about the Victorian family, often through invoking the ‘myth’ of Charlotte Brontë. This post-Victorian mythologising of Charlotte as both dutiful daughter and champion of female singleness was important to feminists, as they traced the genealogies of the woman writer and of women’s political achievements. For women writers from the 1910s to the 1940s, Charlotte Brontë is revered as a figure emblematic of the Victorian daughter’s entrapment within the patriarchal household, and as a pioneering woman writer who created modern, rebellious heroines. Looking back to representations of solitude, independence and singleness in Charlotte’s letters and in her last novel, Villette, modernist authors used their spinster heroines to reject purely domestic identities in order to embrace the world of paid work.

The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor

Following Elizabeth Gaskell’s defence of her friend’s posthumous reputation in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë has frequently been associated with ideas of static and feminised local place. In Shirley, however, the extent of Brontë’s preoccupation with a more expansive vision of global space and mobility becomes apparent. This chapter explores Shirley’s sophisticated understanding of global space and mobility and reveals Brontë’s topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of her friendship and correspondence with the emigrant Mary Taylor, the model for Shirley’s Rose Yorke. It concludes by showing how Taylor’s own powerful fiction and travel writing can be viewed as one of Brontë’s most radical legacies; one which has been obscured by Gaskell’s more famous memorialisation.

Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette

This chapter focuses on the critical fortunes and adaptation history of Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette. It suggests that the critical reappraisal of Villette came too late in the twentieth century for the novel to become canonised in Hollywood film adaptations in the manner of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, while at the same time, the innumerable plays and films about the Brontë sisters’ lives have limited the opportunities for adaptations of the Brontës’ other works. This chapter investigates the specific challenges of adapting Villette for the screen, while also considering why, conversely, it has been adapted more frequently for stage and radio. It argues that the solutions that radio and theatre adapters have found can force us into a reassessment of Villette’s power and distinctiveness.

‘The insane Creole’: the afterlife of Bertha Mason

This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.

Reading the revenant in Charlotte Brontë’s literary afterlives: charting the path from the ‘silent country’ to the seance

This chapter explores the reasons for the Brontës’ longstanding connection with haunting and the supernatural, and how this has been intertwined with processes of fictionalisation. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë in particular, it traces her connection with the supernatural back to Elizabeth Gaskell’s seminal biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Within Gaskell’s biography are embedded a series of macabre ghost stories that have the effect of supernaturalising and semi-fictionalising the life of its subject. This chapter demonstrates that Gaskell’s influence can be seen both in the commemorative ghost poetry of the nineteenth century, which we might think of as proto-fictional biography, and in the works of fictional biography that featured the Brontës as ghosts throughout the inter-war period. It follows the trajectory of Brontë’s fictionalisation by charting nineteenth-century commemorative poetry’s gradual approach to fictional biography in terms of its ghosts’ increasing communicativeness and vocalisation.

‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

Jane Eyre’s transmedia lives

The ongoing interest in Jane Eyre and its various adaptations, appropriations, mash-ups and sequels are indicative of the fact that the story and the main character have loosened themselves from literary forms and have become transmedia phenomena. Taking into consideration the independent web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and the media discussion it generated among online communities, this chapter argues that in contrast to popular screen adaptations of the novel, the web series disentangles the heroine from the romantic plot and re-positions her within a network of relationships that encourage her growth. In this way, the series bypasses gender critiques levelled at Charlotte Brontë’s text and the majority of its mainstream adaptations. The web series’ media format and exploration of authorship enables its viewers to treat it both as an adaptation and a fictional vlog, highlighting the complex ways in which this classic of Victorian literature continues to matter today.