Emily Bront_'s writings explore, expand, and transgress limited nineteenth-century ideas of the nature of the female lot and of women's creativity. This study offers an extensive rereading of the poems which focuses on Emily Bront_'s problematic relationship to the Romantic tradition in which they were produced, and to the critical tradition in which they have been reproduced. Using recent feminist work on gender and genre Lyn Pykett throws fresh light on the complexities of Wuthering Heights, and suggests that much of this novel's distinctiveness may be attributed to the particular ways in which it both combines and explores Female Gothic and the emerging realist domestic novel, a genre also widely used and read by women. Contents: Emily Bront_: A Life Hidden from History; The Writings of Ellis Bell; 'Not at all like the poetry women generally write' Emily Bront_ and the Problem of the Woman Poet; Death Dreams and Prison Songs; Gender and Genre in^R Wuthering Heights; Changing the Names: The Two Catherines; Nelly Dean: Memoirs of a Survivor; The Male Part of the Poem; Reading Women's Writing: Emily Bront_ and the Critics

Kathleen Constable's ambitious work A Stranger Within the Gates investigates fully Bront`'s Irish heritage and the way in which it is reflected in her literary endeavours, including Jane Eyre and Shirley. Constable draws on primary sources to illuminate the relations of Ireland and England, then gives a conclusive literary background of the Bront` family. An analysis of both Bront`'s juvenile and mature pieces reveals the persistence of Irish characters, Irish nouns, and Irish narrative elements that, Constable argues, point to Bront`'s Irish consciousness. The use of mask and theater in Jane Eyre is discussed as an anti-colonial construct within the Victorian novel. Finally, Constable places Jane Eyre in the Big House literary tradition. Together, the four sections of this work aim to connect otherwise separate and unrelated fields of literary study: the Victorian Novel and the Irish experience.

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bront&ës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as &"victim feminism,&" arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that &"professional femininity&"&—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions&—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters&—and readers&—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.