Editorial Introduction

2024 marks a series of anniversaries in Brontë history. The year commemorates the anniversary of Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s registration at the Clergy Daughters’ School in Cowan Bridge. On 21 July 1824, Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest children, were only the seventeenth and eighteenth children to arrive at the school, but as Juliet Barker notes, the children should have arrived at the school sooner but were delayed ‘because they were still delicate from having had whooping cough and measles in the spring’ ([1994] 2010, 148). Charlotte joined her older sisters a few weeks later on 10 August, and Emily followed soon after on 25 November. Charlotte’s immortalisation of the Clergy Daughters’ School in the guise of Lowood in Jane Eyre (1847) will ensure that readers need no reminder of the hardships the Brontë children experienced while at Cowan Bridge. Nor will readers need reminding that less than a year after their arrival, Maria and Elizabeth were brought home suffering from consumption and passed away at home aged just 11 and 10, respectively, something that Elizabeth Gaskell attributed to the children’s weakened ‘constitutions’, the ‘principal’ cause of which was the bad food at the institution ([1857] 1997, 58).

2024 also marks the bicentenary of the Bog Burst at Crow Hill, an ecological phenomenon witnessed by a then six-year-old Emily, seven-year-old Branwell and four-year-old Anne. On Thursday 2 September, they were walking on the moors with the family’s servants, Nancy and Sarah Garrs, when the bog violently erupted, leaving the walking party facing an unexpected torrent of muddy water, peat and rocks hurtling towards them in the valley. Patrick Brontë, who heard the thunderous explosion from the upstairs windows of the Haworth Parsonage, famously wrote about the event in a variety of forms, including his private letters, a delivered and published sermon, and poetry, among others. For more on the history of Patrick’s bog burst writings, Shawna Ross’s article in the journal from 2021 (issue 46:3) is invaluable; here, Ross argues persuasively for the scientific relevance—and not dismissal—of Patrick’s assorted writings on the incident.

In a different spirit, issue 49:1–2 of Brontë Studies marks the climax of something I hope will generate its own history in Brontë scholarship: the inaugural Brontë Studies Early Career Essay Prize. This annual prize, which is generously supported by Taylor & Francis and the Brontë Society, aims to encourage new scholarship in the field of Brontë studies, recognise and reward outstanding achievement by new researchers, and support the professional development of the next generation of Brontë scholars. Launched in 2023, the prize was established in honour of Margaret Smith, who remains one of the most important Brontë scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal received many submissions for the prize (reaching double figures in the first year) and all entries were anonymised and considered by an independent judge and a member of the Editorial Board before being subjected to peer review. Throughout the process, all entries were judged according to the journal’s standard scholarly criteria, including originality, significance and rigour. I am delighted that issue 49:1–2 leads with the publication of the winning essay for the first iteration of the Brontë Studies Early Career Essay Prize and to announce Dr Katherine Hobbs as the prize-winning author for her article ‘“Odd and incorrect”: Convention and Jane Eyre’s Feminist Legacy’. Hobbs’s exceptional essay re-evaluates the Victorian reception of Charlotte Brontë’s novel across pamphlets, essays and the periodical press as well as its legacy in literary criticism. Unpicking the novel’s complex cultural history, Hobbs explores how Jane Eyre’s political slipperiness originally produced contradictory responses from critics who were unsure what Jane Eyre ‘actually is’. Accordingly, Hobbs argues that the accepted modern view of Jane Eyre as a liberal feminist text is far more complicated than has hitherto been recognised, especially for the Victorians. The judge for the inaugural prize commented that Hobbs’s essay not only ‘revisits early and more recent responses’ to Jane Eyre, ‘re-contextualizing them in ways that further problematise the novel’s relationship with the feminism of its day and subsequent interpretations by feminist critics from the 1970s onwards’, but ‘asks bold, fundamental questions’ in ‘a sharp, witty and provocative style’. Congratulations to Dr Katherine Hobbs, whose essay will remain accessible on the journal’s website for the remainder of this year. A huge thanks also to the judge for this year’s prize who did a wonderful job reviewing all the entries and assessing them fairly and in detail. As part of the process for the essay prize, the journal is working with all authors whose submitted work was considered of publishable quality, offering a mode of mentoring support as they publish their work for the first time. The call for submissions to this year’s iteration of the prize is now open, more of which below.

The next article, ‘Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Horace’s Ars Poetica, Lines 179–88: Nelly Dean as Tragic Nuntius’ by Russell M. Hillier, closely examines a fascinating manuscript available in the Hugh Walpole Collection of King’s School, Canterbury, which is attributed to Emily Brontë and comprises translations from Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Building on extant readings of Wuthering Heights (1847) in relation to Horace, Hillier provides a detailed interpretation of Emily Brontë’s narrator Nelly Dean, reading her in the role of tragic nuntius or messenger. As Hillier argues, Nelly’s overarching role and her presiding account of the eleven reported deaths in the novel align closely with Horatian standards of marking tragic acts as tragic nuntius.

In the following article, ‘“I thought unaccountably of fairy tales”: Jane Eyre, Form and the Fairy Tale Bildungsroman’, Daniel Dougherty examines how Jane Eyre has been compared to various tales, many of which rely on the narrative arc of specific characters. Dougherty, however, focuses on how the effect of the fairy tale-esque mode collides with the Bildungsroman. To Dougherty, the textual meeting place of genres in Jane Eyre enables Charlotte Brontë to question the narrative finality of each genre. The result, as Dougherty argues, is that Charlotte portrays Jane in plural forms, offering continued and successive reinventions of her leading character throughout the novel.

Remaining with Charlotte Brontë, Channah Damatov’s article ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia’ provides a nuanced and sustained close reading of Villette (1853). Damatov establishes how Charlotte Brontë’s writing displays a prolonged and consistent interest in the Book of Esther, and that Villette demonstrates Charlotte’s intertextual relationship with the biblical source most fully. Looking at both the figure of Vashti and the entirety of the Book of Esther in light of contemporary readings of the materials, Damatov argues that through Lucy Snowe, Charlotte uses the biblical story to address the intertwined issues of sexism and xenophobia. Villette, the paper suggests, is therefore an early example of a proto-feminist, intersectional reading of Vashti and Esther.

Turning towards Anne Brontë’s writing, Amanda Auerbach’s article makes the case for an allegorical reading of the realist elements in Agnes Grey (1847). In ‘Anti-Hierarchical Development in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey’, Auerbach argues that Agnes’s evolving relationships and experiences with her pupils provide insight into the ways to respond to one’s impulses as well as towards others. For Auerbach, Agnes’s triumph of morality over desire articulates an anti-hierarchical model of self and community that, as the author demonstrates, correspondences with Talia Schaffer’s conception of communities of care.

In the next paper, ‘Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë’, Julie Elizabeth Young takes a solitary mention of air balloon flight in Brontë’s ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829) as a jumping-off point to explore the meaning and significance of Brontë’s brief reference to such scientific invocation. Young situates Charlotte’s singular description of balloon flight within a wider social and literary context, demonstrating how this seemingly fleeting textual image offered by a young Charlotte Brontë opens a way to understand her wider knowledge of balloons in literature and culture. For Young, Charlotte’s reference to what was then a new scientific phenomenon is evidence of her self-alignment with a tradition of Romantic discourse, particularly the work of Mary Shelley.

Moving back to Emily Brontë’s writing, in ‘Penistone Crags, Ponden Kirk and the Fairies of Wuthering Heights’, Simon Young compares the folklore associated with the real-life Ponden Kirk in Brontë Country to the fictional folklore connected to Penistone Crags in Wuthering Heights. Mapping the history of folklore emerging from Haworth and the surrounding area that Emily might have been familiar with, particularly references to ‘Fairy Caves’ and ‘elf-bolts’, Young illustrates how Emily embeds such real-life folklore references in her novel. Moving on from Wuthering Heights, towards the end of the article, Young also discusses the Gytrash, a legendary being infamously evoked by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre.

Miwa Uhara’s article ‘Symbolic Meanings of Violets in Villette’ examines the symbolic meanings of flowers and vegetation in Charlotte Brontë’s writing, with a particular focus on Villette. Drawing on the history and culture of the language of flowers, which was popularised in nineteenth-century Britain, Uhara examines Charlotte’s references to violets in her final novel and finds a wealth of symbolic meanings at play, including allusions to beauty, intertextual references to Wordsworth’s poetry, and invocations of Hamlet.

The final research article in this issue also discusses Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. Although discussion of heroism in the Brontës’ writing has frequently emerged from discussions of their juvenilia, in her article ‘“All true histories contain instruction”: Truth and Everyday Heroism in Agnes Grey’, Rosa Ortiz Notario suggests that a more mature exploration of heroism can be found in Anne’s first novel. As the title of her article suggests, Ortiz Notario argues that Anne bestows heroic qualities in a variety of characters, whose actions reflect what she terms ‘everyday heroism’. As the article reveals, in Agnes Grey Anne’s conception of heroism is more developed than the earlier iterations in the children’s juvenilia and she places heroism in an intersectional context, considering the complexity of gender and class in Victorian society and culture.

Following the presentation of a rich collection of reviews by Carolyne Van Der Meer, the issue closes with two further announcements. As mentioned earlier, the call for this year’s iteration of the Brontë Studies Early Career Essay Prize is now open and full details can be found towards the back of this issue. Anyone currently registered for an MA or a PhD or within three years of completion of either award may submit an original article for consideration. Please read the instructions in the guidance document presented here and online for further details. Entrants are encouraged to read this year’s winning essay in preparation. The deadline for submissions to the prize for this year is 31 August 2024, with the winning essay being published in 2025.

The second announcement is a reminder that the call for articles for a special issue of Brontë Studies on the theme of ‘The Brontës and the Wild’ remains open. Guest edited by Dr Amber Pouliot, the journal welcomes the submission of full articles by 31 May 2024 and a reprinting of the call is presented at the back of this issue and online. Guidance on the format, presentation and submission of articles can be found on the journal’s website: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ybst20.

I close this Editorial Introduction with news of some changes regarding the journal’s Editorial Board. As members of the Brontë Society will have seen in the January issue (92) of The Brontë Society Gazette, Dr Sarah Fanning decided to stand down from the role of Co-Editor-in-Chief in autumn 2023. Since her appointment to the role in 2021, Sarah has overseen a significant number of developments in the operation of the journal, work that often goes unseen by many. Her commitment, energy and hard work have been invaluable in implementing a multitude of changes required to ensure the journal’s longevity and prosperity. As she indicated in her Gazette commentary, her decision is not one she’s taken lightly but is one that has been necessary in the ongoing challenge to manage an ever-increasing full-time academic workload. I’m very lucky to call Sarah one of my closest friends and collaborators, and I’m delighted that we will continue to work together on other projects. On behalf of a variety of individuals—too many to name here—I wish to say a big thank you to Sarah. She will continue as an ordinary member of the journal’s Editorial Board in an ex officio capacity.

For similar reasons, Carolyne Van Der Meer has also made the difficult decision to stand down from the role of Reviews Editor for Brontë Studies, a role she has held for the past eighteen years—a remarkable feat. Carolyne has worked tirelessly over the years to support the work of various Editors in bringing reviews of new and relevant titles to the journal’s readers far and wide. I take the liberty of speaking on behalf of previous Editors when I thank Carolyne for her hard work over these years. Like Sarah, Carolyne has also made many friends during her time with the journal. I look forward to seeing her business and professional career as a poet flourish in the years to come.

Despite the sad news of Sarah’s and Carolyne’s departure from Brontë Studies, I am pleased to end on a positive note by sharing some good news. It is my pleasure to announce that Josephine Smith, who was already an ordinary member of the journal’s Editorial Board, has agreed to take on the role of Assistant Editor. Jo worked for many years as a copy editor for Brontë Studies, supporting Amber Adams during her tenure as Editor-in-Chief. Under the title ‘Assistant Editor’, Jo has agreed to take on that responsibility again, working with me to support authors in the polishing and precision of their work. Jo has already proven herself invaluable and it is wonderful to have her onboard. Welcome back, Jo!

Similarly, I’m also pleased to announce that Dr Peter Cook will replace Carolyne Van Der Meer as the journal’s Reviews Editor. Peter will already be known to readers as a respected scholar in the field of Brontë (and Dickens) studies. He has presented at many Brontë conferences, published numerous articles and reviews in the journal (as well as materials elsewhere), and is the regular co-author—along with Dr Sara Pearson and James Ogden—of the invaluable Brontë Reading List. The issue you have before you will be Carolyne’s final one and issue 49:3 will find Peter at the helm of the Reviews section. Welcome onboard, Peter!

I very much look forward to working with Jo and Peter on future issues of the journal, the next one of which will be sent to you digitally or in hard copy in July. Do remember that you can find the journal on social media too. On ‘the social media formerly known as Twitter’, now X, the journal’s handle is @BrontëStudies, and on Instagram, you can find Brontë Studies as @brontestudiesjournal. Happy reading and best wishes.