Synopses & Reviews
This book raises fundamental questions about our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Charlotte Brontë 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 Brontë'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 Brontë's mature published work, where her psychological insight into the complexities of sexual need finds its consummate expression. Brontë'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 Brontë, who still challenges us to comprehend the subtleties and complexities of her impressively articulated discourse on sexuality.
Review
'In Charlotte Brontë 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 Brontë'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 in Studies of English Literature
Review
'Maynard should be particularly commended for arguing against 'the tendency' of Victorianists, in his words, 'to diminish Brontë'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 Brontë's maturing self-awareness.' Nancy Armstrong in Victorian Studies
Synopsis
Charlotte Bront? centred her life's work on explaining the complexities of our sexual nature, and in fact anticipated many of the fundamental assumptions of the sexually-based psychologies of the twentieth century. In this pioneering work John Maynard shows how her early stories and novelettes deal openly with an underworld of consuming passion, adultery, seduction, promiscuity, frigidity, and incest. He then traces how these themes are incorporated and developed in her mature work - notably Jane Eyre and Villette, both of which offer an intensely felt but freely realised vision of sexual awakening. He shows that despite the problems of her own sexual life, which he considers in his opening chapter, Charlotte Bront's artistic vision in her great novels offers the possibility of sexual and psychological growth in an age beset by all manner of repressions and inhibitions.
Table of Contents
Preface; Introduction: The worlds of Victorian sexuality; 1. Coming of age in the nineteenth century; 2. Charlotte on the couch: the perils of posthumous analysis; 3. Exploring sexuality: life in the world below; 4. Problematics of a sexual success story: The Professor; 5. Sexual awakening in the romance world: Jane Eyre; 6. Brontë and her society: censorship and sexual literature; 7. Women, society and sexuality: Shirley; 8. Complexities of sexual awakening in the realistic world: Villette; Appendix: The diagnosis of Charlotte Brontë's final illness; Notes; Index.