Charlotte Brontë

Amber K. Regis is Lecturer in English at the University of SheffieldDeborah Wynne is Professor of English at the University of Chester

‘To remind oneself of just how provisional even the most "definitive" treatments of Brontë's life and work inevitably turn out to be, you have only to turn to Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives, edited by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Here you will find an account of the dizzyingly varied ways in which scholars and creative practitioners have metabolized Brontë's work in the decades since her death before returning it to the world, transformed.’Kathryn Hughes, TLS January 2018‘The book begins with a scrupulous and detailed account of actual and conjectural pictures of Brontë … I cannot think of another artist whose appearance has received so much attention. What is the difference between the continuing life of works of art and the continuing life of an artist? What difference does it make to that continuing life when the artist is a woman? … Most of the essays in part 1 focus on the “afterlife” part of this collection, and are thoughtful, scholarly, and consistently attentive to what it now means to study a Victorian cult writer in relation to the history of her reception and to contemporary concerns.’Janet Gezari, Connecticut College, Victorian Studies, Volume 61, Number 1, Autumn 2018

• Introduction: picturing Charlotte Brontë – Amber K. Regis and Deborah WynnePart I: Ghostly afterlives: cults, literary tourism and staging the life 1 The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf – Deborah Wynne2 The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration, and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor – Jude Piesse3 Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels – Charlotte Mathieson4 Reading the revenant in Charlotte Brontë’s literary afterlives: charting the path from the ‘silent country’ to the seance – Amber Pouliot5 Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed – Amber K. RegisPart II: Textual legacies: influences and adaptations6 ‘Poetry as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife – Anna Barton7 The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing – Emma Liggins8 Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette – Benjamin Poore9 The ethics of appropriation; or, the ‘mere spectre’ of Jane Eyre: Emma Tennant’s Thornfield Hall, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights – Alexandra Lewis10 ‘The insane Creole’: the afterlife of Bertha Mason – Jessica Cox11 Jane Eyre’s transmedia lives – Monika Pietrzak-Franger12 ‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre – Louisa YatesAppendix: Charlotte Brontë's cultural legacy, 1848–2016 – Kimberley BraxtonIndex