Charlotte Bronte

This book will demonstrate by close rereading of her four novels that Bronte in not the out-of-touch, unsophisticated writer, unaware of conventions she and her sisters are breaching, as Gaskell puts it in her biography. In practice she is well aware of issues of the day and she questions, rather than contradicts, many accepted views. Skills first honed in the Juvenilia provide alternative readings of such views by the subtle use of language, imagery, allusion and structural patterns which speak to the reader. Long before twentieth century theorizing of the narrator, Lucy Snowe and Crimsworth destabilize their own narratives. Structural parallels also offer alternatives: Moore and William Farren in Shirley , Rochester and StJohn Rivers in Jane Eyre . When Jane succumbs to marriage with Rochester she undermines the effects of the mere statement ‘Reader, I married him’ not ‘He married me’; and by still using her unmarried surname when telling the story years later. Such ambiguities turn the novels into ‘classic’ or ‘timeless’ works open to repeated reinterpretations which will be illustrated from critiques by writers such as Virginia Woolf and from the many film and TV adaptations.