Anna Barton (Sheffield): on Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife

This talk explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Charlotte’s discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on Jane Eyre and Shirley, it proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

Anna Barton is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Tennyson’s Name (Ashgate 2008) and a guide to In Memoriam (EUP 2012) and has published work on a variety of  Romantic and Victorian poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Edward Lear, EBB, Blake and Swinburne. Her latest monograph, Nineteenth Century Poetry and Liberal Thought: Forms of Freedom is due to be published by Palgrave in 2017.