In her feminist polemic, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf famously wrote of the (comparatively recent) literary tradition of female writers: ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Woolf’s major literary mothers were those women novelists writing during the Victorian period and earlier. Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës examines all of Woolf’s writings on the Brontës, across a wide range of genres: juvenilia, novels, literary essays, feminist polemics, diaries and letters. This proves particularly fruitful as Woolf herself was both a creative artist and a literary critic. As a woman, she was ambivalent towards the Victorian world in which she spent her youth: emotionally she remained in thrall to it; but intellectually she developed the modernist novel. After Woolf ceased to write publicly about the Brontës, she continued to engage with them through the Hogarth Press, which she had founded in 1917 with her husband Leonard. She then chose to publish books on the Brontës whose approaches to them she supported. Newman approaches her subject in a Woolfian way: that is, she avoids dogmatism and aims to open up discussion of the lives, works and afterlives of the Brontës as mediated by Woolf, rather than closing it down to one particular interpretation.

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë’s legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author’s diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

The twelve essays collected in this work explore the afterlives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in biographical fiction, or biofiction, and its sister genre, the biopic. The essays situate these genres in relation to their generic, cultural, and ideological contexts, and are organised into four groups. The first locates the origins of biofiction in the historical novel, and in Modernist experiments in life writing, while the second consists of case studies of biofiction about writers from the long nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Rupert Brooke. A guest essay by novelist Maggie Gee opens the third group, which analyses the fertile sub-genre of biographical novels about Woolf, while the fourth and final part of the book concerns the related genre of the biopic. The volume is comprised entirely of original commissions, whose authors include postgraduate students, practitioners and specialists in biographical writing. It will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on life writing and contemporary literature modules, as well as fans of the featured biographical novelists and their subjects.

Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.

They discover new texts and methodologies, exploring nineteenth-century British women's historiography, their writing of history, often through unexpected sources not previously regarded as historical venues: journalism, travel writing, architectural preservation, and costume balls."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes the novels Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.