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

Zeitschrift:
ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

ISSN: 2531-1654 2531-1646

Datum der Publikation: 2022

Nummer: 43

Seiten: 63-85

Art: Artikel

Andere Publikationen in: ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

Zusammenfassung

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.

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