Edinburgh University Press Violence and the Brontes: Language, Reception, Afterlives (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures)

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontës’ representations of brutality shocked initial Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontës accounts for such intense reactions by tracing the sisters’ self-conscious grappling with the transformational complexities of representing violence in literature as a destructive but also mutually creative force. Through a new reading of the Brontës’ major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontës’ imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life and continues to be vital to interpreting their works’ reception history and afterlives in modern culture.