New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Bronte (review)

Termed by George Moore a literary Cinderella, Anne Brontë has only recently been restored to the critical attention she enjoyed upon the first publication of her novels. For complex reasons of family history and personal proclivities, Charlotte Brontë did not encourage the republication of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) after the first edition quickly sold out. And Anne's own invisibility inevitably followed the lapse of her work's availability.

Editors Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess have set out to help remedy the long neglect of this youngest Brontë by adding to other recent reassessments a collection of essays from diverse hands, both established and new scholars. Their introduction strikes an unfortunately limiting note in returning too automatically as a point of departure to the old truisms about Brontë's art: it is autobiographical, derivative, didactic. Making that gesture at the outset suggests a much more restricted enterprise than the volume, in fact, delivers. Fortunately, the essays tend to escape the limitation of this frame. They proceed from the premise that Brontë is "an artist in her own right" and set about exploring her creative achievement. Some of these essays place Brontë's novels in a particular historical context or literary tradition that points to innovation and development within a mode of representation or subgenre; others use the resources of recent critical approaches to develop new readings of the works.

The volume includes five essays about Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey (1847), and cumulatively they enrich our appreciation for the aesthetic accomplishment of a work that is still relatively unknown. Larry Peer's "The First Chapter of Agnes Grey: An Analysis of the Sympathetic Narrator," argues for Brontë's innovation in the bildungsroman. Demonstrating the novel's links to great works of the Continental tradition, Peer explains the narrative departures that make Agnes Grey unique: the sympathy elicited for a character in the process of development and identification with her as a model for the reader.

James Simmons's "Contextualizing the Governess" sets off in what seems a promising direction to elaborate the relationships between Brontë's heroine and real-life counterparts. The goal is to demonstrate a realistic representation of the governess in Anne's works that eschews the romanticism of Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1847). But the essay does not take us much beyond an assertion of the veracity of the portrait whereas we are eager to learn toward what critical or artistic ends that verisimilitude is functioning. Marilyn Gardner takes another interpretive tack in analyzing the discourse of food in Agnes Grey as "a metaphorical register of culture" (45) in which the body may be nourished but not the soul. But it is Bettina Knapp's succinct essay, "Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey: The Feminist; 'I must stand alone,'" that best captures the breadth of social analysis and grasp of literary technique that inform this novel. Knapp identifies the "rhythmic and imagistic variety" of the prose (71), the "smooth, ordered, classically constructed sentences" (72), the seemingly effortless transitions between narration and description, the skillfully wrought drama, the psychological insight, and stringent social critique that justify what might seem the hyperbole of Moore's early claim that "[i]f Anne Brontë had lived ten years longer she would have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even a higher place" (qtd. 72).

With Knapp's bridging analysis, the volume shifts to essays about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Garrett Stewart develops a smart and illuminating argument about "Narrative Economies" in Brontë's second novel, building upon numerous previous studies to argue that the reader, like the tenant, is an occupant of a let space, in this case "a Hall of mirrors" (98). Stewart begins by questioning what turns structure into content, asking what logic locks together the two strata of framings in the...