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Juliet McMaster couldn’t have foreseen how successful her new venture was going to be when, in 1994, she founded the Juvenilia Press with the idea of applying the principles of textual criticism to...

This essay reassesses Charlotte Bronte’s attitude to the pub-lic visibility of the author by looking at her early art work and writings. The fo-cus is on two pencil drawings she made of characters from the juvenilia: Alex-ander Soult, a poet, and one of Branwell’s pseudonyms, and Zenobia Marchioness Ellrington, known as ‘the Madame De Stael of Verdopolis’. The essay situates Charlotte’s visual and verbal portraits of Soult and Zenobia within a broader culture of the author portrait in the literary albums and magazines of the 1830s. It identifies, for the first time, her sources for the image of Zenobia, and links her fantasy author portraits to Branwell’s ‘Pillar’ portrait.

Dismissed by Mrs Gaskell as of little interest and thus largely unknown, Charlotte Bronte’s juvenilia, the mass of serialized works, poems, short tales and novellas, have grown in significance and ...

Although a great deal has been written on the colonial influences in the works of the Bronte sisters, there is always more to discover. This paper will present several little-known facts that appear to connect the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge during the time of the Brontes’ attendance there with the world of West Indian plantation owners and Yorkshire cotton spinners. No conclusions are drawn but the material is suggestive, particularly in connection with Charlotte’s last unfinished novel, Emma. This paper will also propose that both Charlotte and Emily Bronte reworked the only important black character from the juvenilia — Quashia Quamina — into their mature writing: Charlotte, in her late juvenilia, presents him as a minor and comic character. Emily uses his story as a template for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

The common perception of Charlotte Bronte’s attitude to Roman Catholicism as one of suspicion and distrust, if not straightforward hostility, is superficial and reductive. The atmosphere of the Bronte household was in that respect one of tolerant indifference rather than outspoken criticism, and references in the juvenilia make Roman Catholicism seem exotic rather than dangerous. It was only the experience of her time in Belgium, reflected in The Professor and Villette, that helped Charlotte Bronte to develop a mature response to Roman Catholicism — one in which her overt hostility hides a sense of interest, attraction, and sometimes even fascination with things Catholic.

As in her other writings, Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Roe Head Journal’ illustrates her use of the Bible to articulate her concerns at times of crisis, as well as to express the tension between passion and restraint that underlies her fictional representations of similar crises in the lives of her heroines. Her journal also reflects her theological fears about her attachment to her creative, ‘infernal’ world, while at the same time portraying her artistic life as divinely inspired.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was one of the many real-life heroes, probably the pre-eminent one, in Charlotte Bronte's life and works. He was a masculine type that attracted her, as both woman and writer, from a very early age; but she was not alone in her admiration of what Carlyle called 'the great ones of the earth'. The paper argues that Charlotte's response to historical characters like the Duke of Wellington is not only part of a cultural dynamic of hero-worship that provided a ready context for 'veneration' but is also part of the complex self-fashioning that we all experience in the process of identity formation. Wellington and his various mutations can be traced in her writing from the juvenilia to Shirley in particular, and can be seen as an evolving critique on the hero. They also reflect an important element of Charlotte Bronte's personal narrative and indicate the way hero-worship helped to mould her ambition, her love of politics and her idea of integrity.

'Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington', written in a small handmade booklet by Charlotte Bronte at the age of thirteen, importantly adds to the Brontes' reading history and provides further evidence of Charlotte's particular veneration of the Duke of Wellington, one of her personal heroes who appears in various guises and transformations in her juvenilia and novels. This essay discusses the identification of the previously missing continuation of the manuscript and its significance, and provides a complete transcription of the whole of 'Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington' for the first time.

Although a number of Bronte scholars have studied the many similarities between Jane Eyre and fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, one significant difference between the novel and its fairy-tale influences is Jane's physical plainness. This essay examines Jane's appearance specifically as a contrast to fairy-tale heroines such as Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's Beauty in her version of 'Beauty and the Beast'. As a contrast to the fairy-tale beauties invoked throughout the novel, Jane's plainness takes on the dimension of social critique. This essay demonstrates, through an examination of the significance of female beauty in Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia and in nineteenth-century renditions of Beauty and the Beast, that Charlotte uses plainness and beauty to condemn an upper-class system of values which, by emphasizing the importance of a woman's appearance, limited her ability to develop selfhood and achieve autonomous action.

The rhetoric of Emily and Anne Brontes' Diary Papers is closely examined in order to assert that these texts notably fashioned Emily as a speaker, a woman and a writer, creating a blurred ethos of secrecy, defiance and fiction that prevented any intrusive reader from authorizing her.

Charlotte Bronte’s Roe Head Journals and later novelettes are perused, exploring her possible knowledge and appreciation of Italian culture since her youth. Also analyzed is her usage of Italian in the Juvenilia.

This article is the core of a chapter on Charlotte Bronte’s novel Shirley from a thesis paper in which I explored the tension between organized religion and personal faith in Charlotte Bronte’s four major novels, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. In this chapter, I specifically examine how Shirley combines many of the themes from Charlotte Bronte’s juvenilia and earlier novels, most strikingly the themes of death and resurrection, and the deep connection of Shirley herself to her Mother Earth. Shirley is also distinguished from Charlotte’s other novels by its exploration of Robert Moore’s implied atheism. I also examine the interesting theme of Mariolatry that runs through the novel, both in Caroline’s search for her idolized mother, and Robert’s frequent tendency to liken Caroline to the Virgin Mary. The antagonism between Dissenters and the Established Church, which is more vividly depicted in Shirley than in any of Charlotte’s other novels and presents an interesting and timely ex...

This paper addresses the history of Mellaney Hayne, the only identified friend of the Brontes' at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. It corrects the often-repeated misinformation concerning Mellaney's alleged West Indian origins and suggests the reason for that misapprehension. In addition to a brief history of Mellaney's life (necessarily patchy), her likely influence through her rather remarkable family connections on Charlotte and Emily Bronte's juvenilia is discussed, as well as the possibility that she may have been a source of information used by Charlotte Bronte in the writing of Jane Eyre.