The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts
Edited by Amber K. Regis, Deborah Wynne
Explores the relationship between the works of the Brontës and the visual, musical, plastic and performing arts
- Presents authoritative critical assessments of the representation of the visual, musical, plastic and performing arts in the work of the Brontës
- Discusses a broad range of the Brontës’ own artworks, including recently discovered materials
- Includes thoughtful and provocative readings of how the Brontës’ writings have been adapted and transposed across artistic media, including film, television, radio and digital cultures
- Explores the vital and sometimes disruptive role played by art in the heritage, tourism and creative industries built upon the Brontës’ lives, images and reputations
The Brontë family produced and consumed art across a range of media and genres. Haworth Parsonage and the local region proved a crucible of inspiration not only for Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, but also for their parents. Here were fostered the creative ambitions of four of the nineteenth century’s most provocative novelists, poets and visual artists. In turn, the Brontës now sustain heritage, tourism and creative industries that adapt and disseminate their lives and work, their likenesses and words, across the globe: in books, on a plethora of screens (film, TV, computer and phone), in discarnate audio (radio and podcasts) and embodied on stage. The essays collected here offer the first panoramic and sustained examination of the Brontës’ lives, work and legacies in relation to the visual, musical, plastic and performing arts, tracing their influences and transformations across the lives and cultural afterlives of this extraordinary literary family.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Deborah Wynne and Amber K. Regis
Part I. Contexts and Texts: Visual Aesthetics and the Brontës
1. The Art of the Brontës: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Jane Sellars
2. ‘Distant prospects are Anne’s delight’: Landscape Art in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Deborah Wynne
3. Branwell Brontë and the Visual Aesthetics of Death
Kimberley Braxton
4. Charlotte Brontë’s Visual Aesthetics: Reading Art in Jane Eyre and Villette
Tamara S. Wagner
5. Altering the Colour: Aesthetics and the Poetic Imagination in Emily Brontë’s Poetry and Wuthering Heights
Deborah Denenholz Morse with Lydia Brown
6. ‘To novels and plays not inclined’: Patrick and Maria Brontë and the Arts
Valerie Sanders
7. ‘Be a man, sir!’:Contending Interpretations of Heroism in the Angrian Illustrations
Ann-Marie Tupciauskas-Richardson
Part II. Cultures of Influence
8. Sculpture, Sculptors and the Brontës
Susan B. Taylor
9. Charlotte Brontë’s Shameful Theatre: Stage, Page and Autobiographical Acts in Villette
Amber K. Regis
10. ‘Those shadowy recollections’: The Brontës and Romanticism
James Quinnell
11. ‘When pure religion, rules the feeling heart’: The Brontës’ Evangelical Romanticism
Simon Marsden
12. The Brontës and the ‘National Art’ of Ireland
Melissa Fegan
13. Charlotte Brontë’s Mythic Figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon’, The Professor and Jane Eyre
Carl Plasa
Part III. The Lives, Heritage and the Natural World
14. Three Gatherings of Brontëan Flora and Fauna: Myth, Parsonage, Literature
Shawna Ross
15. Planting a Garden in Brontë Country: Gardens in the Brontës’ Lives, Art and Legacy
Jude Piesse
16. ‘What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?’: Wuthering Heights, Yorkshire Noir and the Ontological Work of Genre and Place
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
17. ‘Grander and more correct’: The Art of Brontë Life-Writing, 1850–1940
Lucy Fellows
18. More Brontë Stories: Mythography and the Art of Life-Writing
Siv Jansson
19. Making the Absent Present: Contemporary Art in the Brontë Parsonage Museum
Nick Cass
20. The Brontës: A Musical: Two Interviews
Part IV. Afterlives: New Editions, Media Arts and Adaptation
21. A Reprinting History of the Brontës’ Poetry, 1850–1899
Alexis Easley
22. The Brontës and Illustration:n Private Sketches and Public Representations
Simon Grennan and Deborah Wynne
23. Staging Buried Lives: Brontë Adaptations and the Problems of Passivity
Frances Babbage
24. Unseen Scenes: Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor on BBC Radio
Catherine Paula Han
25. Auteurs and Authenticity: Adapting the Brontës in the Twenty-First Century
Shelley Anne Galpin
26. Unmooring the Brontës: Digital Afterlives
Kylie Mirmohamadi
27. Emily and Anne Brontë as Fanfiction Writers: The Gondal Saga
María Seijo-Richart
28. The Brontës and Neo-Victorianism: The Afterlives of Wuthering Heights and the Legacy of Wide Sargasso Sea
or, Reading Race and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child and Michael Stewart’s Ill Will
Claire O’Callaghan
29. The Brontës and Popular Culture: Reading and Misreading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Jo Waugh
Notes on Contributors
Index
A fresh and richly engaging collection of essays. Brontë enthusiasts will enjoy exploring the family's artistic relationships with the imaginary and material worlds around them. This wide-ranging volume also subjects the Brontës’ artistic afterlives to some fascinating analysis, proving that the Brontës continue to exert a potent influence, from stage to visual art and now digital media.
