Charlotte Brontė and Sexuality - Softcover

Maynard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521335876 ISBN 13: 9780521335874

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1987

Synopsis

This book raises fundamental questions about our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Charlotte Brontė was no 'other Victorian' living out a secret life in a sexual underworld, but she did centre her life's work on exploring the complexities of our sexual nature. John Maynard shows how Brontė's early stories and novelettes, written from her teens to young maturity for a private audience of her sisters and brother, deal openly with a 'world below' of consuming passion, adultery, seduction, promiscuity, frigidity and incest. He traces how these themes are incorporated into Brontė's mature published work, where her psychological insight into the complexities of sexual need finds its consummate expression. Brontė's mature novels, especially Jane Eyre and Villette offer an intensely felt but finely realised vision of sexual awakening. They are however, deeply aware of the difficulties that beset sexual experience. Unlike a number of studies, this book stresses the insight, achievement and artistic mastery of Charlotte Brontė, who still challenges us to comprehend the subtleties and complexities of her impressively articulated discourse on sexuality.

About this title

Book Description

This book raises fundamental questions about our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Charlotte Brontė was no 'other Victorian' living out a secret life in a sexual underworld, but she did centre her life's work on exploring the complexities of our sexual nature.

Review

'In Charlotte Brontė and Sexuality, John Maynard joins his deep understanding of the social history of the period with a full analysis of the surviving biographical information and Brontė's fiction to show how she was able to 'develop an art that examines fully the complexities of sexual experience' that justified 'the sexual life against prudes and sceptics alike' .' Donald H. Reiman, Studies of English Literature

'Maynard should be particularly commended for arguing against 'the tendency' of Victorianists, in his words, 'to diminish Brontė's work into a mere personal expression of despair over her early traumatic experiences, whether of sexual conflict, or of loss and of rage at her role as a woman in a patriarchal society'. Against this tendency, Maynard seems to offer an admirable alternative when he makes her fiction objectify Brontė's maturing self-awareness.' Nancy Armstrong, Victorian Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521335876
• ISBN 13: 9780521335874
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276