Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë: A Neo-Victorian Biofiction of Pride and Prejudice

  1. Llorens Cubedo, Dídac 1
  1. 1 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
    info

    Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02msb5n36

Revista:
ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

ISSN: 2531-1654 2531-1646

Año de publicación: 2022

Número: 43

Páginas: 63-85

Tipo: Artículo

Otras publicaciones en: ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

Resumen

Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (2009) is a first-person narrative of the last ten years of the Victorian novelist’s life. It is a neo-Victorian celebrity biofiction, tending to the hagiographic. It draws on various biographies of Brontë, on her letters and on her autobiographical novels. Interestingly, it also evokes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel that Brontë famously disliked. The present article considers Secret Diaries within the parameters of neo-Victorian biofiction; it identifies parallelisms with Austen’s classic; it reassesses the relationship between Brontë and Austen; and, in doing all this, shows that the chronological scope of Neo-Victorianism is broad.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Adamson, Alan H. Mr. Charlotte Brontë: The Life of Arthur Bell Nicholls. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2008.
  • Anderson, Walter E. “Plot, Character, Speech, and Place in Pride and Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 3, 1975, pp. 367‒82.
  • Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Penguin, 1994.
  • Beer, Patricia. Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. MacMillan, 1974.
  • Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, edited by Richard J. Dunn, Norton, 2001.
  • Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley, edited by Jessica Cox, Penguin, 2006.
  • “Brontë Biofiction Books.” Goodreads, 2022, www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/ bronte-biofiction/.
  • Breuer, Rolf. “Jane Austen etc. The Completions, Continuations and Adaptations of her Novels.” EESE Resources, 2000, webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/ eese/breuer/biblio.html/.
  • Cottam, Rachel. “Diaries and Journals.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, edited by Margaretta Jolly, 2 vols, Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001, Vol. 1: A–K, pp. 267‒69.
  • James, Syrie. Syrie James. AuthorBytes, 2021, syriejames.com/.
  • James, Syrie. The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. Avon/Harper Collins, 2009.
  • Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Columbia UP, 2007.
  • Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “This Old Maid: Jane Austen Replies to Charlotte Brontë and D. H. Lawrence.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 3, 1975, pp. 399‒419.
  • Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 4‒21.
  • Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Speculations in and on the neo-Victorian Encounter.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1‒18.
  • Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben. “Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives.” Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects, edited by Kohlke and Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Series 6, Brill, 2020, pp. 1‒53.
  • Lackey, Michael. Introduction. Biographical Fiction: A Reader, edited by Lackey, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1‒15.
  • Lewes, George Henry. “The Novels of Jane Austen.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, no. 86, 1859, pp. 99‒113.
  • “List of Literary Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 July 2022, en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_literary_adaptations_of_Pride_and_Prejudice/.
  • Llewellyn, Mark. “What Is Neo-Victorian Studies?” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 164‒85.
  • Middeke, Martin. Introduction. Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, edited by Middeke and Werner Huber, Camden House, 1999, pp. 1‒25.
  • Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. Vintage, 2002.
  • Novak, Julia, and Sandra Mayer. “Disparate Images: Literary Heroism and the ‘Work vs. Life’ Topos in Contemporary Biofictions about Victorian Authors.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2014, pp. 25‒51.
  • Ostrov Weisser, Susan. “Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and the Meaning of Love.” Brontë Studies, no. 31, 2006, pp. 93‒100.
  • Read, Herbert. Reason and Romanticism: Essays in Literary Criticism, Faber and Gwyer, 1926.
  • Smith, Margaret, editor. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford UP, 2007.
  • Villegas-López, Sonia. “(Re)Tracing Charlotte Brontë’s Steps: Biofiction as Memory Text in Michèle Roberts’s The Mistressclass.” Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Series 6, Brill, 2020, pp. 294‒321.
  • Wilks, Brian. Charlotte in Love: The Courtship and Marriage of Charlotte Brontë. Michael O’Mara Books, 1998.