This book explores many forms of desire, including homoerotic and heterosexual desire, in Charlotte Bronte s works. It focuses on the importance of Bronte s heroines relationships with substitute mothers and the significance of the emotional bond that these women maintain while engaging in heterosexual relationships. Charlotte Bronte and Female Desire also offers theoretical views of mothers, mothering, and female homoerotic desire through an examination of the works of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Nancy Chodorow."

This original and provocative study looks at literary and cultural discourses relating to sexuality and religion in Victorian England.

In this unique collection of essays, ten distinguished critics and biographers consider what it means to narrate a life. Their illustrative texts are largely taken from nineteenth-century biography, autobiography, and the novel, but narrative is the broader genre that unites their various inquiries. The principal issues are framed by Margaret Atwood, J. Hillis Miller, and Phyllis Rose. Atwood compares and contrasts the biographer and the novelist as creators of narratives, emphasizing that the difference is in the "ground rules." Determining what these ground rules are is a recurring theme in...