Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World

Eleanor Houghton read English at the University of Oxford and is currently a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Southampton. She is completing her doctoral thesis “Charlotte Brontë, ‘Plainness’ and the Language of Dress” and works as costume consultant and historical advisor for the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the BBC.   Justine Pizzo is a Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. Her book project, provisionally titled “The Character of Climate: Woman and Atmosphere in Victorian Fiction,” examines how aerial climates shape female characterization in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels. Her essays on Charlotte Brontë have appeared in PMLA and in Climate and Literature (ed. Johns-Putra, 2019) published by Cambridge University Press.

1. Introduction - Eleanor Houghton and Justine Pizzo.- 2. Burying Bertha - Cornelia Pearsall.- 3. Gendering the Comic Body: Physical Humour in Shirley - Justine Pizzo.- 4. Charlotte Bronte and the "Yorkshire Marriage" - Valerie Sanders.- 5. Catholic Things and the Jesuit Order in Villette - Julie Donovan.- 6. Charlotte Bronte: From a Yorkshire Girl to a Regency Writer and Dandy - Judith E. Pike.- 7. Scholarship and Sentimentality in the Museum Context - Christine Nelson.- 8. Charlotte Bronte's Moccasins: The Wild West Brought Home - Eleanor Houghton.- 9. Charlotte Bronte's "Chinese Fac-similes": A Comparative Approach to Interpreting the Materials of Authorial Labour and Artistic Process - Barbara Heritage.- 10. The Materialities of Charlotte Bronte's Medievalism - Claire Broome Saunders.