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  • Tracing an Anglo-American Literary Family Tree
  • Anne K. Phillips (bio)
Jane Eyre’s American Daughters: From The Wide, Wide World to Anne of Green Gables: A Study of Marginalized Maidens and What They Mean, by John Seelye . Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005.

A prolific and wide-ranging expert in American literature, John Seelye is a graduate research professor of American literature at the University of Florida and the consulting editor for Penguin Classics in American literature. He has published on and edited a multitude of American and British authors and works during his long and distinguished career, from Herman Melville, Richard Harding Davis, and Mark Twain to Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, among others. Seelye has also studied more broadly the literature of the Old West, Plymouth Rock in American literature, and culture and rivers in American life and literature, among other works. At this stage in his career he seems especially fond of constructing influence studies (in a 2004 article he suggests the influence of John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath on Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, for example). Many years in the making, Jane Eyre's American Daughters contains a wide-ranging discussion of Charlotte Brontë's life and works and traces Brontë's influence on a series of books by American women for American girls published between the late 1840s and approximately 1915.

Organized into two sections, Jane Eyre's American Daughters begins with "Charlotte's Web," a discussion of nearly a hundred pages on Brontë's life and literary works, followed by "Sleeping and Other Beauties," eleven chapters on the literary descendants that might be identified as reworking to some extent different aspects of Jane Eyre and Brontë's literary characteristics and concerns. In the first two of these chapters, Seelye discusses Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore. In the next two chapters, he assesses Louisa May Alcott's Moods, Work, shorter pieces such as "Whispers in the Dark" as well as "Behind a Mask" (Alcott's most overt reworking of Jane Eyre), and Little Women (including Good Wives). He then turns in the next few chapters to that Anglo-American conundrum, Frances Hodgson Burnett, with particular attention to Little Lord Fauntleroy, Sara Crewe (the original, although he does refer briefly and with some distaste to its multi-genre revisions), and The Secret Garden, as well as [End Page 207] Burnett's autobiography. In the final chapters, he addresses Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and its interpolated "sequel," New Chronicles of Rebecca, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs and, to a lesser extent, its sequel, Dear Enemy, Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up, and L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. (I suppose it would take a second volume to address the sequels to Anne, but Seelye might find generous "scope for imagination" there as well.)

Among the aspects of Brontë's life and work that Seelye is especially interested in are her depictions of what Seelye deems "perverse" (34) relationships between men and women, particular older, controlling men and young, naive women—a dynamic best represented by the Rochester-Jane relationship but a constant element throughout Brontë's work. Seelye shows that this dynamic stems from Brontë's passion for and separation from Constantin Heger, the husband of the headmistress for whom Brontë worked at a school in Brussels. Readers familiar with the central male-female relationships in The Wide, Wide World, Elsie Dinsmore, Little Women, Sara Crewe/A Little Princess, Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm will anticipate one major strand of Seelye's study. Additionally, his psychoanalytic approach is linked with an attention to the fairy-tale aspects of the work of Brontë and the American women writers. "Cinderella," with what Seelye refers to as "its marvelous transformations leading to marriage to a prince and the privileged life that rank and wealth can bring" (9), is of particular importance in his literary history, although he acknowledges shadings of "Beauty and the Beast" and "Bluebeard" as well. Drawing from Alan Dundes's casebook on Cinderella tale types and...

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