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This study of Charlotte Brontë's novels draws on original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women's day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context. Through a close consideration of the ways in which Brontë's novels engage with the thinking of their time, it offers a powerful argument for the ‘literary’ as a distinctive mode of intelligence, and reveals a Charlotte Brontë more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be.

Using psychoanalysis as the primary model of textual analysis,Bluebeard Gothicfocuses on the conjunction of religion, sacrifice, and scapegoating to provide an original interpretation of a canonical and frequently-studied text.

At the start of 2023 we launched our annual book sponsorship programme and received support from the Friends of Elizabeth Gaskell's House that enabled us to repair nine books in the collection, including a rather dilapidated copy of Shirley by Charlotte Bronte and Lizzie Leigh by Elizabeth Gaskell. Earlier this year we successfully applied for funding from the AIM Brighter Days Grant Scheme to purchase new shelving for the attic, in order to create a museum-standard collection storage area that will make the collection more accessible and ensure items are stored in the best possible manner. [...]although the House is doing well, we are still suffering from the effects of the pandemic and still urgently need financial support via donations and grant funding.

In this book Cora Kaplan looks at the politics of ‘Victoriana’ from the 1970s to the present, a politics that emerges from the alternation between nostalgia and critique in fiction, film, biography and literary studies. She asks how Jane Eyre can still evoke tears and rage, as well as inspiring imitation and high art, and why Henry James has become fiction’s favourite late Victorian character in the new millennium?

The Manchester Histories Festival was held at Gorton Monastery in June. The theme of Brook Street Chapel's Heritage Days in September was 'Unitarian Inventors' so we decided to feature Elizabeth Gaskell as an inventor of stories which was an interesting interpretation. The last Manchester meeting of the year was an in-depth talk by Frank Galvin on his involvement in sourcing items for the restoration of Elizabeth Gaskell's House, turning it into the magnificent house that we see today.

In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. InFamily Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of \"family\" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families-between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees-offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.

Ever since its publication in 1847 Jane Eyre - one of the most popular English novels of all time - has fascinated scholars and a wide reading public alike and has proved a source of inspiration to successive generations of creative writers and artists. There is hardly any other hypotext that has been re-worked in so many adaptations for stage and screen, has inspired so many painters and musicians, and has been so often imitated, re-written, parodied or extended by prequels and sequels. New versions in turn refer to and revise older rewritings or take up suggestions from Brontë scholarship, creating a dense intertextual web. The essays collected in this volume do justice to the variety of media involved in the Jane Eyre reworkings, by covering narrative, visual and stage adaptations, including an adaptor's perspective. Contributions review a diverse range of works, from postcolonial revision to postmodern fantasy, from imaginary after-lives to science fiction, from plays and Hollywood movies to opera, from lithographs and illustrated editions to comics and graphic novels. The volume thus offers a comprehensive collection of reworkings that also takes into account recent novels, plays and works of art that were published after Patsy Stoneman's seminal 1996 study on Brontë Transformations.

Marzia has located his grave in Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds, where he was buried on 16 April 1872, and his final home at 'Hall Croft' in Horbury Wakefield, now a Grade II listed building and the current home of the local Working Men's Club. [...]spoke a crew member - fifty years later, in 1905 - so the ship was in service when Dickens was still alive. In 2012, Ruth Richardson had published a book exploring the Cleveland Street Workhouse and its proximity to Norfolk Street in London where the Dickens family had lodgings.

Southey's \"morning traveller\" spends the day listening to unfamiliar sounds, until, in the evening, he hears a \"distant sheep-bell,\" which teaches him that \"sweetest is the voice of Love / That welcomes his return. \"7 A sheep bell is, of course, a tracking mechanism, facilitating the free movement and eventual return of sheep to a shepherd. Judith Butler has observed that \"my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. [...]through the sheer dubiousness of understanding other people, we can achieve a kind of negative shared humanity. Echo, explains Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a form of self-knowledge deprived of self-knowledge, a \"mortiferous\" epistemology both disorienting and powerful.10 What the Crimsworths believe to be a Southeyan sheep-bell summons them into an erotics of death and spectrality.