During the winter of 1838-39, Emily Brontë lived close to Shibden Hall, whose owner was Anne Lister. Lister's diaries reveal numerous sexual and romantic relationships with women, including her 'marriage' to Ann Walker. While critics and historians have speculated about the connection between Anne Lister and Emily, no consideration has been given to the connection between Charlotte Brontë's novel, Shirley, and Anne Lister's life, despite obvious similarities and the likelihood that Charlotte knew of Lister. Like Shirley Keeldar, Lister was a Yorkshire landowner, who adopted a masculine persona and was attracted to a weaker, more feminine woman. But we do not suggest a crude cause-and-effect between Lister's life and Charlotte Brontë's novel. Instead, it is more appropriate to read Lister's diaries as chronicling ideas and attitudes that were part of Charlotte's world and which open up readings of Shirley which would, before the discovery of Lister's diaries, be anachronistic. In this way, Lister's text allows a more explicitly sexual interpretation of female relationships in Charlotte's novel.
Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontëë's The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette) as simply "not England." In contrast, this essay considers the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette, arguing that Belgium represents a crucial middle-ground between British and French values in the mid nineteenth century. Not only was Belgium the location of the decisive British victory over the French at Waterloo, but British commentators also increasingly depicted Belgium as a "little Britain on the continent," or potentially Anglicized space, in the 1840s. Drawing on both Brontëë's explicit references to the Napoleonic Wars in The Professor and Villette and contemporary Victorian conceptions of Belgium, this essay argues that Brontëë's use of this particular foreign space is not just a result of her experiences in Brussels in the early 1840s. Instead, the overlooked middle——ground of Belgium epitomizes the conflict between British and French values in Brontëë's fiction——and the possibility of their reconciliation. While Brontëë ultimately rejects the idea that Belgium represents the site of a possible Anglo-Continental union, it is nonetheless a space in which Brontëë's characters reformulate or consolidate their ideas of home, revealing Britishness to be both culturally produced and value-laden in Brontëë's fiction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.