Matthew Heitzman, “‘He Resembled the Great Emperor’: Charlotte Brontë, Villette , and the Rise of Napoleon III” (pp. 199–223) This essay offers a local historical context for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), reading it in relation to the rise of Napoleon III as Emperor of France. Napoleon III completed his ascendancy just as Brontë was completing her novel. His rise prompted a mixture of anxiety and optimism in the English press, as English political commentators were uncertain if this new Napoleon’s reign would mark a return to the Anglo-French nationalist strife of the first Napoleonic period or if his rule would mark a détente and productive path forward for Anglo-French relations. I argue that this ambiguity is coded into Brontë’s characterization of Monsieur Paul Emanuel, and that we can read Monsieur Paul’s romance with Lucy Snowe as a political allegory—Brontë’s attempt to decipher what Napoleon III’s rapid rise meant for Anglo-French relations. I suggest in this essay that Brontë’s interest in the contemporary Anglo-French political context was a product of her fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte, specifically his rivalry with the Duke of Wellington, and that understanding her interest in the first Napoleonic period can help us to decipher why her depiction of Anglo-French nationalist interaction in Villette is totally at odds with her other novels, where French nationalism is typically a trait that needs to be effaced.

Winter Jade Werner, “All in the Family? Missionaries, Marriage, and Universal Kinship in Jane Eyre ” (pp. 452–486) As a number of critics have shown, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) has as a central theme the analysis of certain essential contradictions in a constellation of ideas concerning kinship and race. In this essay, I propose that these contradictions—which receive fullest exposition in the missionary St John’s determination to wed his kinswoman Jane—gesture toward the history of these issues as they were enacted in missionary literature. Jane Eyre , this essay contends, roots itself in a fraught phase of the Protestant missionary movement: the brief period of time prior to the 1820s when missionary societies, eager to realize what they termed “universal kinship,” not only permitted but encouraged missionaries to enter into interracial marriages. These marriages, however, proved more reciprocal in influence than missionary societies had anticipated. Ultimately they undermined assumptions of British Christians’ “natural” superiority over “natives”—the very assumptions that underwrote missionary work in the first place. Unnerved by the reciprocity and openness these unions appeared to establish between spouses, missionary societies began discouraging intermarriage and dissociated conceptions of “universal kinship” from actual racial mixing. This period of controversy unifies the novel’s anxious focus on family formation and interracial marriage. In exposing how intermarriages worked to legitimate and problematize evangelical understandings of universal kinship, Jane Eyre ultimately suggests that there exists a crucial link between St John’s proposed endogamous union with his kinswoman and Rochester and Bertha’s intermarriage—the former becomes the conceptual alternative to the latter.

Thomas J. Joudrey, “‘Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run’: Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights ” (pp. 165–193) This essay traces a problem that has long dogged criticism of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847): why is a novel concerned with passionate love for others populated by characters who are radically selfish? Brontë, drawing on the Byronic tradition and eschewing contemporary exhortations to self-renunciation, validates selfish desire even at the expense of communal responsibility. In so doing, she is forced to contend with the possibility that selfishness risks disabling sociality and marooning the self in shame, isolation, or solipsism. Brontë shows, however, that selfishness and sociality are symbiotically implicated, in that selfishness acts as a precondition of robust sociality. After a series of failures—represented in Lockwood’s shame-saturated retreat into childish sociality, Heathcliff and Catherine’s self-destroying soul fusion, and Linton Heathcliff’s masturbatory selfishness—Brontë ultimately locates a brokered compromise between selfishness and sociality in the relationship of Cathy and Hareton. By maintaining their respective boundaries of self and yet making them selectively permeable, the two demonstrate that susceptibility to interpersonal exchange proves vital to fostering their autonomy as discrete selves. Wuthering Heights wages battle on two fronts, excoriating the temptation to enclose the self behind impenetrable barriers, but simultaneously denouncing the other extreme that would eradicate all difference through metaphysical soul-fusion. Brontë posits instead that mature selfhood can only be yielded by a posture of openness to external influences, even as the coherence of the self must be fortified against appropriation by those influences.

Nora Gilbert, “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess” (pp. 455–480) Much has been written, both during the Victorian era and in recent literary and cultural-historical criticism, about the plight of the nineteenth-century British governess, a plight that is largely attributed to her uncomfortable position of “status incongruence,” as M. Jeanne Peterson has usefully labeled it. Because the governess was deemed inferior to the family she worked for but superior to the family’s domestic servants, her free time was not uncommonly spent on her own—even, more specifically, in a room of her own. And, just as Virginia Woolf would envision in her landmark feminist treatise, the activity that this isolated, educated woman habitually and productively turned to was the activity of writing. Almost all resident governesses relied on letter writing as their primary source of connection to the outside world, but many also expressed their thoughts and opinions in the form of journals, diaries, memoirs, advice manuals, essays, poems, and works of fiction. Bringing together a diverse sampling of fictional and nonfictional accounts of the governess’s relationship to authorship (and paying particular attention to the novels and letters of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, our best-known and most culturally resonant governesses-turned-authoresses), this essay outlines the ways in which the governess, both as an iconic figure and as a real, writing woman, influenced the formal, stylistic, and thematic development of nineteenth-century women’s literature.

In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre . Via its invocation of Jane Eyre ’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away from models of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way in which character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity of the other.

Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontëë's The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette ) as simply "not England." In contrast, this essay considers the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette , arguing that Belgium represents a crucial middle-ground between British and French values in the mid nineteenth century. Not only was Belgium the location of the decisive British victory over the French at Waterloo, but British commentators also increasingly depicted Belgium as a "little Britain on the continent," or potentially Anglicized space, in the 1840s. Drawing on both Brontëë's explicit references to the Napoleonic Wars in The Professor and Villette and contemporary Victorian conceptions of Belgium, this essay argues that Brontëë's use of this particular foreign space is not just a result of her experiences in Brussels in the early 1840s. Instead, the overlooked middle——ground of Belgium epitomizes the conflict between British and French values in Brontëë's fiction——and the possibility of their reconciliation. While Brontëë ultimately rejects the idea that Belgium represents the site of a possible Anglo-Continental union, it is nonetheless a space in which Brontëë's characters reformulate or consolidate their ideas of home, revealing Britishness to be both culturally produced and value-laden in Brontëë's fiction.