Comprising nine original essays by specialists in material culture, book history,
literary criticism and curatorial and archival studies, this co-edited volume
addresses a wide range of Brontë's writing-from vignettes composed during her
teenage years ("The Tea Party" and "The Secret") to completed novels (The
Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette) and unfinished works ("Ashworth" and
"Emma"). In bringing to life the surprising array of embodied experiences that
shaped Brontë's creative practice (from writing to book-making, painting, and
drawing), Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World forges new
connections between historical, material, and textual approaches to the author's
work.
1. Introduction - Eleanor Houghton and Justine Pizzo.- 2. Burying Bertha - Cornelia Pearsall.- 3. Gendering the Comic Body: Physical Humour in
Shirley - Justine Pizzo.- 4. Charlotte Bronte and the "Yorkshire Marriage" - Valerie Sanders.- 5. Catholic Things and the Jesuit Order in
Villette - Julie Donovan.- 6. Charlotte Bronte: From a Yorkshire Girl to a Regency Writer and Dandy - Judith E. Pike.- 7. Scholarship and Sentimentality in the Museum Context - Christine Nelson.- 8. Charlotte Bronte's Moccasins: The Wild West Brought Home - Eleanor Houghton.- 9. Charlotte Bronte's "Chinese Fac-similes": A Comparative Approach to Interpreting the Materials of Authorial Labour and Artistic Process - Barbara Heritage.- 10. The Materialities of Charlotte Bronte's Medievalism - Claire Broome Saunders.
Justine Pizzo is a Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, UK. Her book
project, provisionally titled "The Character of Climate: Woman and Atmosphere
in Victorian Fiction," examines how aerial climates shape female characterization
in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels. Her essays on Charlotte
Brontë have appeared in PMLA and in a volume on Climate and Literature (ed. Johns-Putra,
2019) published by Cambridge University Press.
Eleanor Houghton read English at the University of Oxford, UK, before being awarded a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities at the University of Southampton, UK. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis "Charlotte Brontë, 'Plainness' and the Language of Dress" and works as costume consultant and historical advisor for the Brontë Parsonage Museum, UK, and the BBC.
