The Case of the Brontës

Neo-Victorian fiction and anything related to in this compilation of essays:

The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism

Edited by Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier

Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN: 9783031321597

This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors' life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives-from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt's Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness-in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.  

Includes the chapters:

Biofiction and the Neo-Victorian Crime Novel: The Case of the Brontës

by Barbara Braid

Neo-Victorian biofiction self-reflexively appropriates the Victorian past, transforming it freely into a story fitting the current cultural milieu. Despite its essentially fictitious nature, biofiction makes claims to authenticity, drawing in its audiences with suggestions that the sensationalised versions of the famous lives are the “true” ones, and often resists the existing grand narratives of Victorian personages that had been disseminated throughout most of the twentieth century. In the context of the myth of Charlotte Brontë as a model of Victorian femininity and authorship that Brontë herself perpetuated the issue of biofictions’ authenticity and its implications for our relationship with the past is further complicated by the myth-making process of biomythography. This chapter analyses the negotiations of authenticity, sensationalism, and presentism in a corpus of contemporary literary biofictions that adapt the life and writing of Charlotte Brontë into a sensational and detective convention. They position Charlotte Brontë as a stock character in crime fiction, either as a criminal (James Tully’s The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, 1999) or a detective (e.g. Laura Joh Rowland’s The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë, 2008 and Bedlam, 2010, or Bella Ellis’ The Brontë Mystery series, 2019–21). These adaptive novels attempt to do away with the Brontë myth, which is then subverted to offer a new, more scandalous neo-Victorian version of the author and her life.

Postcolonial and Global Neo-Victorianisms

by Felipe Espinoza Garrido

The theoretical and practical twin interventions of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” have proven programmatic for neo-Victorianism’s ambivalent relation with colonial legacies. As such, these two texts, as well as their reception histories, provide significant inroads to chart the relationships between neo-Victorianism and notions of the postcolonial and the global, with a particular emphasis on critiques of neo-Victorianism’s hegemonic whiteness. Exemplary and necessarily brief outlines of Indian, Black British, African, and Indigenous South Pacific imaginations of the long nineteenth century—many of which have received widespread academic attention outside of neo-Victorian studies—complement such critical engagement with neo-Victorianism’s own coloniality. These case studies do not primarily chart possible future research areas for neo-Victorian Studies but rather pose questions about neo-Victorianism’s (currently lacking) potential to generate insight for disciplines such as Indigenous studies, African studies, or Black studies, which are already acutely aware of how contemporary hegemonies and paradigms relate to the long nineteenth century’s coloniality.