Charlotte Brontë: restraint and rebellion

2016 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855). Still much loved and read 200 years after her birth, this remarkable writer channelled the difficult experiences of her life into compelling fiction. With a focus on Jane Eyre and Villette and with some reference to her other novels, Shirley and The Professor, we will discuss the political and personal struggles which drove Brontë’s writing. We will consider her work as a negotiation between restraint and rebellion: much of the writing suggests a rebellious spirit and an inquiring intellect at work, striving to challenge convention, particularly religious orthodoxy and entrenched ideas about femininity and a woman’s proper place in the world. However, there is also a strong element of restraint in Brontë’s writing, both thematically and in its form and structure. The novels’ structures organize powerful feelings and melodramatic events into coherent moral and philosophical discussion and combine supernatural elements with the political and social focus of 19th-century realism. Each session will begin with an informal lecture and then the class will open into seminar discussion of the novels, including close-reading of selected passages. Our first session will place the two novels in the context of Brontë’s life and times and then we will go on to analyse the themes and ideas in each of the novels over the subsequent days.