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'Men Shall Not Make Us Foes': Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks
Wynne, Deborah
Wynne, Deborah
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2023-12-01
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Book Chapter - AAM
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Abstract
Sharon Marcus in Between Women (2007) highlighted the variety of friendship models employed by Victorian women, focusing on the female friend’s role in the development of women’s emotional lives and sexualities. Drawing on Marcus’s key insights, this chapter will chart the role of the female friend in the development of Charlotte Brontë’s professional identity and her creation of characters such as Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, who speak powerfully of feminist concerns. The chapter will argue that female friends played a crucial part in helping Charlotte Brontë develop an understanding of women’s rights and she went on to find ways to represent feminist ideas in her novels. During her childhood and teenage years Brontë wrote prolifically ‘as a man’, always employing male narrators. Indeed, her juvenilia is characterised by an overtly ‘masculine’ style forged through her collaboration with her brother Branwell and her immersion in the male-dominated discourse of the Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. She gradually gained a feminist voice following her inclusion in a network of close female friends at Roe Head School, particularly valuing the influence of the radical feminist Mary Taylor, who went on to teach in Europe and then emigrated to New Zealand to set up a shop and become a writer. The letters exchanged between Brontë and her female friends offer valuable insights into the importance of the female network in the mid-nineteenth century, when the professions and higher education were closed to women. Later friends, such as the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, gave Brontë further opportunities to discuss women’s social roles and explore alternative identities to the prescribed ones of wife and mother. Examining Brontë’s letters, as well as her major novels, this chapter shows how her feminist ideas were shaped through the channels of a Victorian female friendship network.
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Wynne, D. (2023). 'Men Shall Not Make Us Foes: Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks. In R. Carroll & F. Tolan (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Routledge.
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Routledge
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Book chapter
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This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in [The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism] on [01/12/2023], available online: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Literature-and-Feminism/Carroll-Tolan/p/book/9780367410261
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9780367410261