Brontë Suggestions

If you had to read just one book by just one of the Brontës, you have a choice of the following:

For Charlotte: Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley (1848); The Professor (1857); Villette (1853)

For Emily: Wuthering Heights (1847)

For Anne: Agnes Grey (1847); The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is probably the all-around best option if you can read only one of the seven books; its plot and themes have been the most influential in both fiction and in critical literature (e.g. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar). Jane Eyre is also probably the most accessible of the seven books. Jane is a sympathetic and relatively open protagonist, telling her story in a straightforward fashion (and in chronological order), without withholding very much information about the other characters or her state of mind.

Emily’s Wuthering Heights is probably the second-most influential of the seven; although it is less significant to literary criticism, it has a pretty significant pop cultural footprint. The interpretations of the characters and the central romance are problematic, though, and some new readers come away from the book wondering where anyone got History's Greatest Romance out of that material. More practically speaking, Wuthering Heights is going to confuse younger readers or people who just don't read very much. It was an option for the classic books we had to read independently when I was in eleventh grade, and most of the students who took a shot at reading it gave up after a few chapters, hopelessly confused by the flashback structure and all the Cathys and Lintons and Earnshaws.

Some people lurve this book and others hate it–or are too irritated with the characters to slog all the way through. I don’t love it, myself, but it also doesn’t irritate me very much, because I strongly feel that the Heathcliff the Romantic Hero is a weird mis-reading that isn’t really borne out in the content of the book. It is a capital-R Romantic novel (i.e. influenced by the ideology that inspired the poetic movement circa the turn of that century), but not a romance. I think the interpretations of the book, rather than the book's actual content, put off some new readers of the book, although the content is dramatic and overwrought at times, too. And all of the characters other than Catherine Earnshaw really are very stupid about Heathcliff throughout the novel, considering that he practically walks about with “Evil” embroidered on his clothes.

Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is not as interesting as a narrative, and I’m not sure if anyone other than a serious fan of Victorian novels would read it for pleasure any more (the material was a bit shocking / scandalous for the 1840s, although not at all in a lurid way). I didn’t choose it when I was putting together my Nineteenth century reading list, but if I were more invested in feminist readings and Victorian social issues in general (and especially issues related to marriage), it would have been a valuable text. Anne’s book seems much, much more typically Victorian than the books by her sisters; I would tend to use it more as a document of its age than as a significant literary work, although there are certainly literary elements of the book that bear examination, as well.

Of all of the books, I like Villette best. If someone liked Jane Eyre but had some issues with the ways Charlotte went about resolving that book, then Villette would be the book for that person; it lacks some of the more absurd contrivances of Jane Eyre, and will seem like a more plausible story to modern readers. It is also a potentially difficult book, because the first person narrator is not a very confiding narrator; plus, some readers will find the conclusion frustrating. Overall, it is a more accomplished novel than Jane Eyre, although it’s much less influential.

The other three books–The Professor, Shirley, and Agnes Grey–aren’t books I have read. I do know that The Professor was Charlotte’s first book, but was published posthumously, and thus is probably more important for a student or fan of Charlotte Brontë than for someone putting together an overview of Nineteenth century literature. I read a few pages of Shirley and had the impression that it was a bit of a departure from Charlotte’s other work, but I don’t know enough otherwise to argue for or against it. Agnes Grey might actually be Anne’s better-known book, but, again, I can’t speak to its virtues or defects, other than to say that Anne is the least necessary of the three for someone surveying the century, rather than working on the Brontës. She does gain some significance if the focus is on woman writers of the century, however; she may be more important, in literary terms, than someone like Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This is where my ignorance is showing–my knowledge of Victorian studies is pretty casual. For that reason, however, I can provide a very good index to the works you need to know to survey the century or discuss the Victorian influence: I only know the Big Names.