Overview

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontes' representations of brutality shocked Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontes accounts for such intense reactions by reading the sisters' literary violences as transformational, encompassing harm, pain and suffering while at times also signalling creativity and even renewal. Through a new reading of the Brontes' major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontes' imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life. In the process, it demonstrates how violence continues to be vital to interpreting the Brontes' reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

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9781399523004

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Reviews

From their first publication to the present day, generations of readers have been fascinated and troubled by the Brontë sisters' depictions of violence. Sophie Franklin explores the ways in which 'violence' is differently configured within each of their works, and the problems it has posed for their later readers and critics. This absorbing and wide-ranging study sheds new light on the continuing strangeness of these well-known texts and the meanings they have come to bear.--Heather Glen, University of Cambridge

Author Information

Sophie Franklin is a DOROTHY MSCA COFUND Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Dublin. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century (2016) and co-editor of Consent: Legacies, Representations, and Frameworks for the Future (2023), as well as several articles and book chapters on the Brontës. She is currently an Associate Editor of Brontë Studies.

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