| In this project, I propose that the Bronte sisters engaged in a literary dialogue with some of their female predecessors, thereby contributing to early feminist discourse. Reading the Bronte novels as companion texts to earlier feminist works, such as Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Charlotte Smith's Desmond, offers a new perspective on various elements in the novels, such as Bertha's laugh in Jane Eyre, on Catherine's ghost in Wuthering Heights, and on Helen's unlikely union with Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte Bronte's later novels, Shirley and Villette , continue the dialogue begun by Fenwick, Hays, and Smith and expounded upon by the Bronte sisters in their earlier, more well-known works.;By putting the Brontes in dialogue with their earlier feminist counterparts, who were similarly accused of being "unsexed females," we gain a new understanding of the feminist themes in Bronte literature, which include the themes of female companionship, of female passion, and of matrimonial misery. Additionally, we gain a new understanding of women novelists from the late eighteenth century, once popular, who have faded into the background of literary studies. What is most shocking, however, is the discovery that the Brontes were much less conservative than subsequent biographers would have us believe.;Charlotte Bronte's fear of being rejected by both her publishers and her readers seems to have prevented her from associating herself with earlier feminists who were more condemned in Bronte's lifetime, the more conservative nineteenth century, than they had been in their own lifetime, the late eighteenth century. The most Charlotte Bronte seemed able to do was to use her novels as a platform for her feminist agenda. It is time to demystify "the Bronte Myth" and to place the Bronte sisters' novels alongside their early feminist companion tests, thereby revealing the rich female literary tradition for which Virginia Woolf was searching but unable to find. |
