Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World

Justine Pizzo is a Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, UK. 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 Bronte have appeared in PMLA and in a volume on Climate and Literature (ed. Johns-Putra, 2019) published by Cambridge University Press. Eleanor Houghton read English at the University of Oxford, UK, before being awarded a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities at the University of Southampton, UK. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis "Charlotte Bronte, 'Plainness' and the Language of Dress" and works as costume consultant and historical advisor for the Bronte Parsonage Museum, UK, and the BBC.

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.