What do you think of those scenes in Jane Eyre where she watches with a professional eye the rising of [Rochester's] passional emotions, and skilfully prevents any culmination of feeling by changing her manner?-Did anybody ever notice it?' 1 These questions come from a letter, dated 5 May 1860, to the American writer and critic James Russell Lowell, from an aspiring New England writer, Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard. Lowell had recently accepted one of Stoddard's short stories for publication in the American journal the Atlantic Monthly, and had sent her a letter advising her on ways in which he felt she could improve her writing style. Her response, commenting on the love games between Charlotte Brontë's heroine and hero, reflects the interest in sexuality evident in her own writing, as well as her admiration for Brontë, whose work seems to have influenced Stoddard rather more than Lowell's advice. He detected in her writing, he said, a tendency to move 'towards the edge of things' , 2 and warned her against it. But Stoddard was captivated by the love games in Jane Eyre, and, especially, the daring representation of a sensual heroine who challenged patriarchal power and claimed the right of self-possession. Brontë's exploration of these themes fused elements of Gothic literature with the domestic, so that, as Elaine Showalter argues in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, her writing 'shows an evolution from Romantic stereotypes of female insanity to a brilliant interrogation of the meaning of madness in women's daily lives'. 3 The images Brontë conjured up of female entrapment and frustrated desire powerfully engaged and inspired Stoddard. At a time when many other American women writers were producing sentimental or moralistic novels, which tended to reinforce the social and cultural values of the time, Stoddard wrote about the passionate self and lamented that America had no 'Elizabeth Browning, Brontë, [or] George Sand'. 4