This book raises fundamental questions about our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte'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 Bronte's mature...