Long-form writing.

An excerpt from my Honours thesis.

In the 2018 film adaption of Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows’ novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a debate ensues between two characters over the novels Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë. The proposition is that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a “more important book than Jane Eyre” and that Anne Brontë’s novel does more than Charlotte’s to challenge the conventions of Victorian society.

When thinking of the Brontë novel, one finds it is Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights which seem to come to mind most readily. The fictional Guernsey character, Juliet Ashton, takes up this matter in her own work as a writer, saying “What a family they were – but I chose to write about Anne Brontë because she was the least known of the sisters, and, I think, just as fine a writer as Charlotte.” (Shafer and Barrows 55). The debate between the Guernsey characters inspires the question I aim to explore in this paper, which considers the contributions of both Charlotte and Anne’s writing contributed to early feminism in Victorian England, against the position of women in society.

By engaging the historical context of the Victorian period, and theoretical arguments through which the political and social position of women – recognised then as ‘the Women Question’ – became strongly contested, as a framework for discussion of relevant examples from Jane Eyre andThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I aim to explore the different ways in which early feminist ideas emerge in the portrayal of the challenges facing the two female protagonists, Jane Eyre, and Helen Huntingdon.

Throughout the Victorian era, women began to challenge their political and social position (Stubbs 4), particularly with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and the increasing demand within the labour market which divided women along lines of class. While working-class women had to work, middle-class women were economically redundant and performed a merely “social, decorative, and childbearing role” (Stubbs 3). Middle-class women were made dependent on the patriarchal structure which placed men in control of the private domain of the home, thus mirroring male control over the public domain of economics and work. This economic dependence was the source of contention that stirred the early feminist movement (Stubbs 4).

Women campaigned from as early as 1830 for equal treatment. The Reform Act of 1832, which excluded both working-class and middle-class women from franchise and owning property, illustrates the environment with which women had to contend (Richardson and Willis 3). The act not only divided men and women based on class but also excluded women simply because they were women (Richardson and Willis 3). With no access to the public sphere, disenfranchised, and unable to own any property of their own, middle-class women came to be seen as “surplus” if they were unmarried and unable to perform their roles as wives and mothers. As Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis point out “[i]n the census of 1851 it was revealed that there were 400 000 ‘surplus’ women. Without a husband, women had no one to keep them or enable them to produce legitimate children; unmarried women were thus surplus to social/reproductive requirements” (Richardson and Willis 4). In light of this, these surplus women threatened the ideology of the separate spheres. If women were unmarried and “uncontained” within a marriage and a home, they had the potential to enter the public sphere, and therefore become “public and visible” (Richardson and Willis 4).