Search results

The purpose of this paper is to alert students, scholars and librarians to the many recently published works of reference on the life and works of the Brontë family. The paper aims to present an account of new major reference works, which are transforming the nature of Brontë scholarship, giving an insight into the development of literary studies in a field which has reached maturity and provides a benchmark for studies with other classic authors.

The paper takes the form of a literature review set against developing scholarship.

After 150 years of scholarship, Brontë studies have reached a peak of maturity in the areas of biography, bibliography and textual transcription.

The greater reliability of recent texts necessitates a re‐evaluation of biographical and critical studies on the Brontë family. The paper indicates the rigorous standards required in author bibliography.

Librarians need to update their reference collections.

The paper brings together disparate sources to provide a coherent overview.

Charlotte Brontë integrated her own and her sisters' traumatic boarding school experiences into her novel, Jane Eyre (1847) as a way of expressing her anger through autobiographical fiction. The aim is to link contemporary research into boarding school trauma to the relevant events, thereby identifying what she wrote as a testimony contributing to the long history of the problematic nature of boarding schools.

Autobiographical fiction is discussed as a form of testimony, placing Jane Eyre in that category. Recent research into the traumatic experiences of those whose parents chose to send them to boarding school is presented, leading to an argument that educational historians need to analyse experience rather than limiting their work to structure and planning. The traumatic events the Brontë sisters experienced at the Clergy Daughters' School are outlined as the basis for what is included in Jane Eyre at the fictional Lowood School. Specific traumatic events in the novel are then identified and contemporary research into boarding school trauma applied.

The findings reveal Charlotte's remarkable insight into the psychological impact on children being sent away to board at a time when understandings about trauma and boarding school trauma did not exist. An outcome of the analysis is that it places the novel within the field of the history of education as a testimony of boarding school life.

This is the first application of boarding school trauma research to the novel.

The purpose of this paper is to compare typical social problems in Germany and Japan in the context of weavers and female weavers.

The paper compares Gerhardt Hauptmann's Weavers (1892) with Wakizo Hosoi's The Tragic History of Female Weavers (1925).

Despite remarkable differences, there are many similarities between the two works in terms of the economic situations in Germany and Japan.

The paper explores differences and similarities in the two works and highlights some typical examples of social problems common to both.

THE ORGANISATION OF a survey at Manchester Polytechnic, following closely upon prolonged correspondence in a semi‐professional journal, testifies to the fear of some colleagues that the public takes a poor view of its librarians. ‘The catalogue does not mention it and the librarians here are useless,’ said Livy in the Apollo Library in Rome. But need we imagine that many modern readers would echo his verdict?

IN 1846, Charlotte Brontë was attempting to find a publisher for the sisters' first book—a selection of their poems. It was a bad time for poetry. In the earlier years of the century it had flourished remarkably with the rise of Scott and Byron, whose popularity brought record sales, but by the 1840s the demand had declined, and while prose fiction had a reasonable market, poetry was unwanted. Even the arch‐publisher of Victorian poets, Edward Moxon, was not keen to undertake the Poems (1844) of the established Elizabeth Barrett, and showed some reluctance even in the publication of Wordsworth. By 1848 Charlotte had come to appreciate ‘that “the Trade” are not very fond of hearing about poetry, and that it is but too often a profitless encumbrance on the shelves of the bookseller's shop’. It is little wonder, therefore, that of 1846 she later wrote: ‘As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted…. The great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied.’

A brief study of the formative influences of the Brontës of Haworth, Yorkshire, indicates the perhaps somewhat neglected background of his youthful education, at St John’s College, Cambridge, of their famous father, Patrick Brontë. He was very fortunate, as an impoverished Irish Protestant, to gain admission to that illustrious Cambridge college, and so into the Anglican establishment: culturally as well as theologically. The religious aspects apart, we can observe here the classical books that formed Patrick Brontë’s mind and heart, perhaps in the end rather lost to sight amidst the bleak Yorkshire moorlands that provided his three gifted daughters with the inspiration for their famous novels.

This is a brief study of the character, and the professional career, of one of the most spectacular and prolific of all the huge medley of book‐publishers in Victorian London. George Smith is perhaps today somewhat overshadowed by other famous names. Nevertheless, in 1944, the Cambridge historian, G.M. Trevelyan, singled him from the rest: as the publisher of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. As the nineteenth century’s cult of printed books inevitably now recedes in favour of information technology, perhaps the time is ripe for this succinct evaluation of an extraordinary publisher from Victorian times who promoted not only works by Leslie Stephen, Thackeray, and many other literary men but particularly works by women‐novelists, such as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, despite the fact that he was far from being a “feminist”, in our own contemporary sense.