The Brontës in the World of the Arts (review)

The useful collection Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells have put together places the Brontës in what the editors call “the wider world” of nineteenth-century arts (9). While acknowledging previous groundbreaking work on the Brontës and the visual arts, especially that by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars in The Art of the Brontës (1995), this collection helpfully opens up and extends the meanings of “art.” It takes into account the traditional areas of concern for Brontë critics—such as painting, drawing, sketching, and engraving—but focuses as well on book illustration, music, fashion, and the material culture of the period. The collection is interdisciplinary also in that it includes, among its eleven articles, three contributions by scholars of music and fashion history. This expansion brings the scholarship on the Brontës and the arts up to date by including new scholarship by key Brontë scholars like Alexander and Richard J. Dunn, but also by fulfilling the mandate of the Ashgate series it forms a part of—“The Nineteenth Century Series,” under the general editorship of Vincent Newey and Joanne Shattock—which aims to look at nineteenth-century literary history as “a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity” (ix). It is in this last regard that the collection succeeds perhaps most admirably. By showing the Brontë siblings as intimately involved with the broadly conceived arts of the era, the volume contributes to the recent historical effort in Brontë studies (as evidenced in the work of, for instance, Heather Glen’s Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History [2004] and Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth [2002]) to position Anne, Charlotte, and Emily as self-conscious participants in contemporary debates, rather than as quaint and isolated inhabitants of a faraway corner of the Yorkshire moors.

The collection is not formally divided into sections—which could have been a helpful method of recognizing and emphasizing its novelty—but it does fall loosely into four discernible parts: first, essays dealing with the visual arts in Jane Eyre (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); second, essays on music in Wuthering Heights (1847) and Shirley (1849); third, essays grouped around a reading of Villette (1853) and its “wider world” of the arts, including acting, fashion, and book illustration; and fourth, essays on the aftermaths and revivals of the Brontës. This breakdown alone shows that the scope of the book’s idea of “the arts” is significantly broader than its predecessors’.

The four essays of the first group, by Alexander, Dunn, Wells, and Antonia Losano, concern what appear to be the most traditional aspects of the collection’s main topic: the influence of the Brontës’ early amateur practice of the visual arts on their published novels. The contributors to this part of the volume are primarily interested in Jane Eyre’s representation of drawing and sketching, and particularly in how Jane is to be understood as a self-conscious representation of the female artist. Alexander sees Jane as an “amateur artist” whose development serves as “a representation of Charlotte Brontë’s own education and artistic trajectory” (11), while Wells argues that “Jane Eyre is ultimately neither artist nor accomplished woman, but suspended between these identities” (69). The standout essay in this part of the volume is Losano’s, as it persuasively argues for a reading of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a sustained examination of female aesthetics, offering a theory of female art at odds with that implied in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. According to Losano, Anne Brontë’s portrayal of Helen as a professional landscape painter “rigorously critiques art that is self-expressive or personally motivated” (47). This argument is important not only in that it fills the gap in Tenant scholarship by focusing more explicitly on its representation of the female artist, but also because it demonstrates the substantial...