Brontë Studies

The Journal of the Brontë Society

ISSN: 1474-8932 (Print) 1745-8226 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ybst20

Some Common Features in the Brontë Sisters’

Novels

Hilary Newman

To cite this article: Hilary Newman (2019) Some Common Features in the Brontë Sisters’ Novels,
Brontë Studies, 44:2, 186-203, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1567166

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2019.1567166

Published online: 19 Mar 2019.

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 € STUDIES,
BRONTE Vol. 44 No. 2, April 2019, 186–203

Some Common Features in the Bront€e

Sisters’ Novels
Hilary Newman

This article identifies similarities among the first-person narratives of the

Bront€e sisters’ mature fiction. It is suggested that the sisters had very close
relationships with each other both within the family and in their profes-
sional lives as novelists. The latter reveal themselves in the shared types of
images taken from the natural world, which draw on observation of the
landscape around Haworth. These include the recurrence of animal, bird,
plant and weather imagery. There are also other very different patterns of
imagery, including that of slavery. Peculiar to the Bront€e sisters’ novels are
the recurrence of physiognomic detail and their shared love of home.

KEYWORDS Agnes Grey, common features, Jane Eyre, The Professor,

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wuthering Heights

Introduction
In her biography of Charlotte Bront€e, Mrs Gaskell recorded her subject’s descrip-
tion of how she and her two sisters, Anne and Emily, spent their evenings:
The sisters retained the old habit [ … ] of putting away their work at nine o’ clock,
and commencing their study, pacing up and down the sitting room. At this time,
they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and described their plots.
Once or twice a week, each read to the others what she had written, and heard
what they had to say about it.1

In a letter to Miss Wooler, Charlotte Bront€e also wrote that her correspondent
knew ‘full as well as I do the value of sisters’ affection to each other; there is
nothing like it in this world, I believe, when they are nearly equal in age and
similar in education, tastes and sentiments’.2 Given this closeness in both their
private and professional lives as writers, it is unsurprising that their six novels
narrated by first-person narrators show some mutual influence. This article will
examine some of the similarities.
The Bront€e sisters were engaged in writing their first novels at the same time:
these were Charlotte’s The Professor, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s

# The Bront€e Society 2019 DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1567166

 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 187

Agnes Grey. Emily’s and Anne’s novels were published in 1847, but Charlotte’s
The Professor was only published posthumously in 1857. Charlotte’s second
novel, but the first to be published, was Jane Eyre, which appeared in 1847.
Anne’s second and final novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in
1848. Charlotte published two more novels after her sisters’ deaths: Shirley
(1849) and Villette (1853). Shirley uses a very different narrator from the rest of
the Bront€es’ novels and so will not be examined here.

First-person narrators
The first-person narrator of The Professor is a young man, William Crimsworth.
The novel begins as an epistolary novel, as William is ostensibly writing a letter
describing his life to an Etonian acquaintance, named only as Charles. However,
at the end of Chapter 1, Crimsworth abandons the technique of the epistolary
novel. Resembling the narrator of Agnes Grey, he is now apparently aiming his
narrative at an unknown public of similar background and experience: ‘My nar-
rative is not exciting and, above all, not marvellous — but it may interest some
individuals, who, having toiled in the same vocation as myself, will find in my
experience, frequent reflections of their own’.3 This audience allows Agnes Grey
greater freedom in her narrative, ‘Such a confession will look very absurd, I fear
— but no matter — I have written it; and they that read it will not know
the writer’.4
In using a male narrator Charlotte was continuing the preference that her
juvenilia reveal. Agnes Grey may have suggested to her the possibilities of a first-
person female narrator, who, like Agnes, is also a governess, for this forms the
basis of her second (but first published) novel, Jane Eyre. Both Agnes and Jane
also give retrospective accounts of their lives; they are looking back from the pos-
ition of happily married women. The influence, however, was not all one way.
Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, also begins as an epistolary
novel. Anne’s initial narrator is also a young man, Gilbert Markham. He, too, is
writing to a male friend, his brother-in-law.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall also shows the influence of Wuthering Heights.
Anne employs a second first-person narrator, a young woman, Helen
Huntingdon. Her narrative is a diary, which she lends to Gilbert to read. This
forms the centre of the novel and extends beyond the diary. After the events
described in the retrospective journal, Helen continues to act as a first-person
narrator through her letters. The two narrators of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
are also the two main characters of the novel. By contrast, the two narrators of
Wuthering Heights, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, are on the periphery of the
action. Both novels begin in the middle of the story, or in medias res, as classical
epics commonly do. The two main narrators of Wuthering Heights and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall have been commented on in contradictory ways. How
far are they reliable narrators? Readers disagree on the question of whether
Gilbert has authorial approval or whether there is an ironic gap between Gilbert
188 HILARY NEWMAN

and his creator. An early reviewer argued that Gilbert seemed to have the
author’s approval, but the anonymous reviewer disagreed, believing that he
‘would serve as the ruffian of any other novelist’, his nature being ‘fierce, proud,
moody, jealous, revengeful, and sometimes brutal’.5 One critic of Wuthering
Heights has summed up the contradictory responses of readers to Lockwood and
Nelly Dean as narrators:
A number of critics have thought of Nelly Dean as representing a standard of
normality in Wuthering Heights, as indicating the writer’s own attitude to the main
characters and events, and as voicing the judgments upon them of conventional
morality. Others have noted that neither of the two main narrators, Lockwood and
Nelly, is capable of interpreting the story adequately.6

These disagreements about the narrators of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and
Wuthering Heights pose questions for every new generation of readers. Each
reader must decide for him- or herself. Surely, though, this very complexity is
part of the enduring popularity of the novels.
In Villette, written and published after her sisters’ deaths, Charlotte Bront€e
also creates an unreliable first-person narrator. Lucy Snowe deliberately with-
holds information from the reader, which we may legitimately demand to know.
Mary Jacobus has indignantly rounded on Lucy Snowe for this reason, ‘Lucy lies
to us. Her deliberate ruses, omissions and falsifications break the unwritten con-
tract of first-person narrator (the confidence between the reader and “I”) and
unsettles our faith in the reliability of the text’.7 In particular, two vital pieces of
information are withheld, one at the beginning of the novel and one at its end.
As Linda Hunt has pointed out: ‘We know nothing about who her parents were,
what happened to them or to the relatives who were responsible for her before
and after her stay in Bretton, or what became of their money’.8 Equally experi-
mental for the period is the ambiguous ending of the novel: is M. Paul drowned
or not?

Animal imagery and animals

Animal imagery is probably the largest single group of images in the Bront€es’
novels. Ellen Nussey wrote of the Bront€e sisters: ‘The Bront€es’ love of dumb crea-
tures made them very sensitive of the treatment bestowed upon them. For any
one to offend in this respect was with them an infallible bad sign, and a blot on
the disposition’.9 Many of the animal images reveal how closely the Bront€e sisters
observed their own domestic pets and used animal comparisons. In Agnes Grey,
Rosalie Murray frequently belittles other people (especially men) by comparing
them to animals. When Edward Weston fails to fall prostrate before her charms,
Rosalie refers to him as a ‘stupid ass’ (AG, p. 119). Later Rosalie’s detested hus-
band, Sir Thomas Ashby, is dubbed ‘a filthy beast’ and a ‘brute’ (AG, p. 161).
Gilbert Markham describes Eliza Millward (his love object before Helen
Huntingdon) as if she were a domestic pet:
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 189

Her voice was gentle and childish, her tread light and soft as that of a cat; — but
her manners more frequently resembled those of a pretty, playful kitten, that is
now pert and roguish, now timid and demure, according to its own sweet will.10

It is a mark of his greater respect for Helen Huntingdon that Gilbert does not try
to reduce her to the level of a domestic pet.
Charlotte Bront€e’s narrator in The Professor, William Crimsworth, uses a more
complex animal comparison to describe his class of female pupils and how he
quells them: ‘a dog, if stared at hard enough and long enough, will shew symp-
toms of embarrassment, and so at length did my bench of Belgians’ (TP, p. 57).
In Jane Eyre, most telling is an animal image used by Mrs Reed on her deathbed.
She explains her reaction when the child Jane turned on her: ‘I felt fear, as if an
animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and
cursed me in a man’s voice’.11 This attitude reveals much about Mrs Reed’s treat-
ment of Jane as a child; she did not regard her as a human being. In Villette, M.
Paul is several times compared to fierce, wild animals of the cat family. When he
is irritated, his face is covered ‘with the mask of an intelligent tiger’,12 or his
‘black whiskers curled like those of a wrathful cat’ (V, p. 223). M. Paul, however,
can turn the tables on Lucy, as when he describes her as reminiscent ‘of a young
she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear
the first entrance of the breaker-in’ (V, pp. 302–03).
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is frequently described in animal terms by
the other characters. Nelly advises him not to ‘get the expression of a vicious cur
that appears to know the kicks its gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world,
as well as the kicker, for what it suffers’.13 Nelly describes Heathcliff’s grief on
the elder Catherine’s death in terms of a wild beast: ‘He dashed his head against
the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a sav-
age beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears’ (WH, p. 148).
There is a continual gratuitous cruelty shown to animals at Wuthering
Heights, which helps maintain the violent atmosphere. And, as Adams succinctly
comments: ‘Heathcliff coerces, controls and intimidates all the inhabitants — ani-
mals and people alike.’14
In their novels, the Bront€e sisters also use animals to show whether characters
have authorial approval. In Agnes Grey, the Bloomfields’ moral inferiority is
revealed by their treatment of birds. In Agnes’s second post as a governess, Mr
Murray would have allowed his gamekeeper to kill a much-loved cat of one his
old cottagers, Nancy Brown. The latter had already thought that, if the Murray
boys were at home, they would have set their dogs on her cat (AG, pp. 90–91).
Matilda has a puppy, but ‘becoming tired of so helpless and troublesome a nurs-
ling’ abandoned him to Agnes’s care. Snap inevitably gives his affection to Agnes,
for which he receives ‘many a harsh word and many a spiteful kick and pinch
from his owner’ (AG, p. 100).
By contrast, the characters that have authorial approval in Agnes Grey love
animals. The Grey family are kind to their pets (AG, pp. 9, 13–14). While the
190 HILARY NEWMAN

worldly rector, Hatfield, knocks Nancy’s cat off his knee, the curate, Weston,
strokes her and smiles in the same situation (AG, p. 83). Snap is purchased by
Weston from the rat-catcher to whom the Murrays had sold him, and is respon-
sible for reuniting his former mistress and present master.
Similarly, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Huntingdon brutally mistreats his
dog. When his favourite cocker, Dash, jumps on him, Huntingdon ‘struck it off
with a smart blow’. Later, Huntingdon calls to Dash, but Dash will not go to
him. Huntingdon follows up his initial mistreatment with a further act of brutal-
ity. He throws a book at Dash, who ‘set up a piteous outcry and ran to the
door’. Helen lets him out (TWH, p. 179).
Helen’s brother, Frederick Lawrence, treats his dogs in a reverse way to
Huntingdon. Visiting Lawrence, Gilbert finds him with
a superannuated greyhound, given up to idleness and good living lay basking
before [a fire] on the thick, soft rug, on one corner of which, beside the sofa, sat a
smart young springer, looking wistfully up in its master’s face; perhaps asking
permission to share his couch, or, it might be, only soliciting a caress from his
hand or a kind word from his lips. (TWH, p. 346)

Charlotte Bront€e’s narrator in The Professor, William Crimsworth, observes his

obnoxious elder brother Edward bully his horse as he bullies his employees:
‘once or twice Jack seemed disposed to turn restive, but a vigorous and deter-
mined application of the whip from the ruthless hand of his master soon com-
pelled him to submission, and Edward’s dilated nostril expressed his triumph in
the result of the contest’ (TP, pp. 13–14). When William resigns his clerkship,
Edward reveals his brutal treatment of both humans and animals. Edward
angrily tells William,
You have gone and told it far and near that I give you low wages and knock you
about like a dog. I wish you were a dog! I’d set to this minute and never stir from
the spot till I’d cut every strip of flesh from your bones, with this whip. (TP, p. 37)

Charlotte Bront€e, like her youngest sister, indicates the moral worth of her
characters by their treatment of animals. Contrasted with the brutal elder
brother is Frances Henri, who will marry William. Frances has a black cat,
which was a favourite with her late Aunt Julienne. The cat rubs its head
against Frances’s gown, confident that it will not be rebuffed, and, indeed,
Frances caresses it. Animals can also provide a link with the recently
deceased, as in this case, and in that of St John Rivers who takes over his
late father’s dog, Carlo, in Jane Eyre.
The three Rivers cousins contrast with the three Reed cousins. The Reeds do
not have any domestic pets — a telling fact. Before being admitted to the Rivers’s
home, Jane had watched the Rivers sisters sitting together, ‘a large old pointer
dog rested its massive head on the knee of one girl — in the lap of the other was
cushioned a black cat’ (JE, p. 332). This is a reassuring sight for Jane, and later
she expresses her belief in Diana’s humanity by telling her, ‘If I were a masterless
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 191

and stray dog, I know you would not turn me from your hearth tonight’ (JE,
p. 337).
In Villette, M. Paul’s loving and kind nature is revealed through a dog, Sylvie.
Lucy tells us of
a small spanieless [ … ] that nominally belonged to the house, but virtually owned
[M. Paul] as master, being fonder of him than of any inmate. A delicate, silky,
loving, and loveable little doggie she was, trotting at his side, looking with
expressive, attached eyes into his face; and whenever he dropped his bonnet-grec
or his handkerchief, which he occasionally did in play, crouching beside it with the
air of a miniature lion guarding a kingdom’s flag. (V, p. 484)

While religious differences put a distance between M. Paul and Lucy, the former
is able to express his feelings for Lucy by using Sylvie as an outlet, ‘calling her
tender names in a tender voice’ in Lucy’s hearing (V, p. 485).
Animals figure prominently in the opening scenes of Wuthering Heights, in
which Lockwood is seen to be out of his depth at the Heights, by trying to caress
the farm dogs. Heathcliff tells him they are not pets (WH, p. 4). On his visit the
next day, Lockwood asks Cathy the younger whether she is going to part with
Juno’s puppies. On hearing that they are not hers to dispose of, Lockwood
exclaims, ‘Ah your favourites are among these!’ as he turns ‘to an obscure cush-
ion of something like cats’. He comments on Cathy’s scornful response,
‘Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits’ (WH, p. 7). These mistakes, all involv-
ing animals, alert the reader to the other misunderstandings that Lockwood has
fallen into at the Heights. All his initial responses to the people and animals at
Wuthering Heights are found to be inaccurate.
In describing Heathcliff’s and Hindley’s behaviour when Mr Earnshaw presents
each with a colt, the nature of each boy is rapidly sketched for the reader.
Heathcliff takes ‘the handsomest’, but on it becoming lame insists on swapping it
with Hindley’s. If the latter will not oblige, Heathcliff will report how Hindley
has thrashed him three times in a week. Because Mr Earnshaw has made
Heathcliff a favourite, Heathcliff can safely tell Hindley that the blows he
received will be given back by Mr Earnshaw with interest to his son. When
Hindley threatened to throw an iron weight at Heathcliff, the latter taunts
Hindley that he will tell Mr Earnshaw of his son’s boast that he will eject the
interloper at Wuthering Heights as soon as his father is dead. Hindley throws the
weight, knocking Heathcliff down. Nelly dissuades Heathcliff from complaining
to Mr Earnshaw. Hindley gives up the argument and gives up the colt, hoping
that Heathcliff will break his neck on it. Heathcliff is going to the colt when
Hindley knocks him under its feet, hoping that he will get his brains kicked out.
Heathcliff, however, coolly gets up and continues his task of changing saddles
and stalls before sitting down to recover from the blow of the weight (WH, pp.
33–34). This scene is indicative of Heathcliff’s adult character, when he will pur-
sue his own aims regardless of other people’s opposition or threats.
192 HILARY NEWMAN

There is critical disagreement as to what the animal imagery and the relation-
ships between characters and animals in Wuthering Heights signify. Graeme
Tytler concluded that ‘it is certain that, in her concern with the primacy of
human relationships, man and animals are, for Emily, not on the same spiritual
plane’.15 Lisa Surridge, however, reaches the opposite conclusion; she argues that
in her Belgian essay, ‘Le Chat’, Emily’s exaltation of the dog reverses the conven-
tional notions of the day:
This signal departure from predominant Victorian views on animal-human
hierarchy distinguishes Emily from Charlotte and Anne as well as from many of
her contemporaries [ … ] Wuthering Heights refutes many aspects of Victorian
animal rhetoric, with its implicit assumption of the superiority of humans
over beasts.16

To a twenty-first-century mind, Lisa Surridge’s view of the human-animal rela-

tionships in Wuthering Heights may seem the most convincing. It is not, however,
easy to agree with another aspect of her argument. Of Hareton’s hanging of a lit-
ter of puppies, Surridge claims: ‘But repeated details at the Heights — from the
killing of rabbits for meat and skins to the plucking of birds for their feathers —
suggest that Hareton’s act does not symbolize grand malignity but is part of
everyday farm labour’.17 Even if it were a necessary culling, surely it should not
be carried out by a boy who is little more than a toddler? What effect would it
be expected to have on such a young child’s character? It is uncomfortably remin-
iscent of Heathcliff’s purely malevolent attempt to hang Isabella’s spaniel, Fanny,
on the night of their elopement. There is little moral distinction between
Heathcliff and Hareton in their respective acts. This fact is awkward, for the
reader will discover that Hareton is to become the hero of the next generation
and intimately involved in the reconciliation of the two original families in his
marriage with Cathy the younger.

Bird imagery
Bird imagery also recurs in the Bront€e sisters’ novels. They are not so prominent
in Anne Bront€e’s novels, but she, too, uses birds to reveal character. The few that
do occur work negatively. In Agnes Grey, Matilda Murray is ‘as happy as a lark’
when she can escape the schoolroom for the stables (AG, p. 59). This act is dis-
approved of both by her parents and Agnes. Similarly, in The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall, a bird simile describes a despicable character: Miss Myers, nominally little
Arthur’s governess, but actually Huntingdon’s live-in mistress, ‘could sing like a
nightingale’ (TWH, p. 324).
At times, Charlotte Bront€e also uses bird imagery negatively in The Professor.
William uses a bird metaphor rather sardonically when he envisages Hunsden
reacting to his failure to make the advantageous marriage which he had antici-
pated, ‘when, instead of a pair of plump turtle-doves, billing and cooing in a
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 193

bower of roses, he finds a single lean cormorant, standing mateless and shelter-
less on poverty’s bleak cliff?’ (TP, p. 179).
It has been argued that representation of birds in Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights ‘illuminates both their characters and the era’s fascination with ornithol-
ogy itself’.18 Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (1797) was a highly
popular and influential book among the Bront€e children. It will be remembered
that this is the book that the child Jane is reading at Gateshead at the opening of
Jane Eyre. The calculation of the number of references to birds in Jane Eyre
varies according to who is counting them. Wallace claims there are nearly one
hundred references to birds, while other critics give a more conservative estimate
of thirty.19
Most notably, Jane and Rochester use bird imagery to describe their percep-
tions of each other. On her return to Gateshead after attending Aunt Reed’s
deathbed, Jane records, ‘there was ever in Mr Rochester (so at least I thought)
such a wealth of the power of communicating happiness, that to taste but of the
crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger birds like me, was to feast genially’
(JE, p. 245). When she has fled Thornfield on hearing that Rochester is already
married, Jane’s heart demands Rochester, with ‘ceaseless longing; and, impotent
as a bird with both wings broken, it still quivered its shattered pinions in vain
attempts to seek him’ (JE, p. 324). Jane’s final bird metaphor occurs when she
returns to the maimed and blind Rochester. While he is unaware of her presence,
Jane thinks his countenance ‘looked desperate and brooding — that reminded me
of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his
sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished,
might look as looked that sightless Samson’ (JE, p. 431).
Rochester acutely perceives Jane, in a bird metaphor: ‘I see, at intervals, the
glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, rest-
less, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high’ (JE, p.
138). When she has returned from Gateshead to the probable marriage of
Rochester and Blanche Ingram, she addresses him as his equal. Rochester tells
her, ‘Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is rending its
own plumage in its desperation’ (JE, p. 253). Bird images are not used consist-
ently in Villette as they are in Jane Eyre.
Wallace calculates that there are at least fifty references to birds in Wuthering
Heights. She adds that Emily Bront€e, as well as being influenced by A History of
British Birds, also turned to Yorkshire folklore, which involved three different
birds: the cuckoo, hedge sparrow and lapwing. Heathcliff has obvious affinities
with the cuckoo, while the original occupants of the nest are like hedge-sparrows
who are evicted by the cuckoo. These are the characters who are defeated by
Heathcliff. Wallace quotes Tate’s observation ‘that in rural areas of Britain, lap-
wings were thought to represent “souls of the dead who remained on earth
because something troubled them”’.20 Equally obviously, this is relevant to
Catherine Linton, who actually pulls lapwing feathers from her pillows in her
delirium and reveals the cruelty of Heathcliff in killing these birds.
194 HILARY NEWMAN

Apart from these important resemblances to certain birds, in Wuthering

Heights it is usually bigger, more threatening creatures that create the violent
atmosphere that pervades the novel. Nelly, however, having discovered the secret
correspondence between Cathy and her cousin Linton, has removed the letters,
and describes Cathy’s realization of her loss:
Never did any bird flying back to a plundered nest which it had left brimful of
chirping young ones, express more complete despair in its anguished cries and
flutterings, than she by her single ‘Oh!’ and the change that transfigured her late
happy countenance. (WH, p. 199)

The importance of home

The Bront€es’ characters share the sisters’ love of home. Anne Bront€e managed to
live away from home as a governess for six years. Nevertheless, Agnes Grey’s first
position as a governess teaches her ‘to love and value my home’ (AG, p. 46).
Agnes and Weston have a discussion about the importance of home. Agnes so
loves hers that she does not think she could live without it. She pities Weston for
having ‘no home’ (AG, p. 98).
Both Charlotte and Emily suffered acutely away from home and threw up
teaching positions to return to Haworth. Charlotte wrote that ‘Human feelings
are queer things — I < would far > am much happier — black-leading the stoves
— making the beds and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like
a fine lady anywhere else’.21 Charlotte Bront€e’s first-person narrators are home-
less orphans. In The Professor, Frances is also an orphan, and she and William
will marry and build their own home. Jane Eyre comes to see her ‘only home’
(JE, p. 246) as where Rochester is. In Villette, Lucy experiences her lack of family
as desolating loneliness. The utmost ambition she can consider is to establish her
own independent school. Nevertheless, she longs to have someone to share her
life with, someone ‘to be dearer to me than myself’; only this would make what
she calls a ‘true home’ (V, p. 434).
Charlotte Bront€e testified to Emily’s love of home: ‘The change from her own
home to a school [ … ] was what Emily failed in enduring [ … ] I felt in my heart
she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her
recall’.22 The elder Catherine feels the same extreme attachment to her home.
Cathy probably values the moorland setting of the Heights rather than the build-
ing itself, but she views this landscape as her idea of heaven (WH, p. 71). When
Cathy is delirious at Thrushcross Grange, her wandering mind returns to the
Heights. It is evident that she never felt at home at Thrushcross Grange with
Edgar Linton; her rightful place was always at Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff.

Plant imagery
The attitudes of the Bront€es to their moorland home is important because they
derived many plant and tree images from their surroundings. One of these opens
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 195

Agnes Grey: ‘All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure
may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriv-
elled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut’ (AG, p. 5).
Agnes gives a description of the governess’s task — which is retrospectively ironic
— ‘To train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day!’
(AG, p.12).
Helen Huntingdon expresses her feelings about her newborn son and her fear
of his corruption by his father in plant metaphors. If the baby should die, she
would find consolation in the thought ‘that the bud, though plucked, would not
be withered, only transplanted to a fitter soil to ripen and blow beneath a
brighter sun’ (TWH, p. 202). Arthur Huntingdon’s attempted reversal of all his
wife has taught their son causes Helen to reflect bitterly how he is ‘preparing the
soil for those vices he has so successfully cultivated in his own perverted nature’
(TWH, p. 277).
In The Professor, Charlotte Bront€e uses plant metaphors for both good and
bad relationships. William describes how the increasing antipathy between him
and his employer, Pelet, is ‘striking deeper root and spreading denser shade daily,
excluded me from every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to feel like a
plant growing in humid darkness out of the slimy walls of a well’ (TP, p. 25).
More positively, William employs an extended plant metaphor to describe how,
while Frances has developed in some ways during their marriage, she also retains
her romance for him:
other faculties shot up strong, branched out broad, and quite altered the external
character of the plant. Firmness, activity and enterprise covered with grave foliage
poetic feeling and fervour; but these flowers were still there, preserved pure and
dewy under the umbrage of later growth and hardier nature. (TP, p. 230)

On arriving at Thornfield, Jane reflects, ‘I thought that a fairer era of life was
beginning for me, — one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its
thorns and toils’ (JE, p. 98). When Thornfield is no longer a paradise for Jane and
she thinks she ought to leave, she expresses a reverse mood in the same language:
‘these thoughts I did not think it necessary to check; they might germinate and
bear fruit if they could’ (JE, p. 163). Expressing the inferiority of Blanche Ingram,
Jane once again chooses the language of plants: ‘nothing bloomed spontaneously
on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness’ (JE, p. 185).
In Villette, Charlotte Bront€e employs plant imagery to express both Lucy’s
periodic despair as well as a brief period of happiness. Lucy compares her life to
a barren ‘hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green fields, no palm-tree, no
well in view’ (V, pp. 225–26). When Lucy’s lot is lightened by the friendship of
the Brettons, she describes the change in terms of trees in a landscape:
Conceive a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secrecy; it lies in dimness and mist: its turf
is dank, its herbage pale and humid. A storm or an axe makes a wide gap amongst
the oak trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell,
196 HILARY NEWMAN

becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden
light out of that beauteous sky, which till now the starved hollow never saw. (V,
p. 323)

Plant and tree imagery arising from the moorland setting of Wuthering Heights is
also common in that novel. After Edgar Linton has hit him, Heathcliff threatens,
‘I’ll crush his ribs in like a rotten hazel-nut, before I cross the threshold!’ (WH,
p. 103). Heathcliff also uses a memorable tree image to describe Edgar’s inability
to heal Catherine: ‘He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it
to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!’
(WH, p. 135).

Weather imagery
In an interdisciplinary approach to the Bront€e sisters’ novels, Rebecca Chesney
undertook a project that ‘looked at how the Bront€es used the weather to under-
line key points in their storylines; to foreshadow events to come; and as an out-
ward expression of internal emotions’.23 Chesney found that the Bront€es used
eighteen different categories of weather types: ‘From drizzle and mist, storms and
gales, thunder and lightning, to sunshine and rain’.
Of particular interest is the way in which the weather is applied to the human
face by all three of the Bront€e sisters. When displeased, Rosalie reveals ‘a very
unamiable cloud upon her pretty face’ (AG, p. 119). When Gilbert tells Helen’s
brother that he is not going to visit Helen at Wildfell Hall any more, Lawrence’s
‘face brightened into almost a sunny expression’ (TWH, p. 348). In The
Professor, William describes how Frances’s ‘depression beamed as a cloud might,
behind which the sun is burning [ … ] on looking up, I saw the sun had dissev-
ered its screening cloud, her countenance was transfigured, a smile shone in her
eyes’ (TP, pp. 125–26). When Rochester refused to let Adele accompany them in
the carriage, Jane’s countenance changes. He asks what the matter is, ‘all the sun-
shine is gone’ (JE, p. 266). In Villette, M. Paul has upset the class by his anger,
but during the lesson his mood improves, ‘Ere he had done, the clouds were dis-
persed and the sun shining out — tears were exchanged for smiles’ (V, p. 312).
The younger Catherine’s face is compared to a landscape reflecting the changing
weather: ‘shadows and sunshine flitting over it, in rapid succession; but the shad-
ows rested longer and the sunshine was more transient’ (WH, p. 234).
There are also many examples of other weather types. For example, rain in
Agnes Grey helps the heroine to share an intimate moment with Edward Weston,
as he shelters her under his umbrella back to the Murrays’ coach. In Jane Eyre
and Villette, the natural convulsions of tempests mark significant emotional
moments in the lives of the heroines. There is a tremendous storm the night
before Jane’s intended marriage to Rochester. In Villette, storms come to stand in
for emotional vicissitudes, of which we are given no further details; particularly
when the reader is not told of the disasters that befell Lucy Snowe’s relations,
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 197

and at the open-endedness of the novel, when we are not told whether M. Paul
drowned at sea or not. In Wuthering Heights, the departure of Heathcliff is
marked by a tempest. The weather also functions as a catalyst for the unfolding
of the whole novel’s story: Lockwood caught a chill while lost in the snow,
returning to Thrushcross Grange from Wuthering Heights, and to pass the time
until he is recovered he asks Nelly Dean to tell him about his neighbours.

Slave imagery
In a ground-breaking article, Humphry Gawthrop discusses the attitude of the
Bront€e family to slavery. I intend here to enter into a sort of dialogue with
Gawthrop’s essay, which I find both stimulating and flawed. Gawthrop draws
attention to Mr Bront€e’s involvement in the abolitionist cause. He had been spon-
sored at St John’s College, Cambridge, by the great campaigner against slavery,
William Wilberforce. The latter had also been on the committee of the Clergy
Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, to which Patrick Bront€e had briefly (and
disastrously) sent his four eldest daughters. When William Wilberforce visited
Keighley in 1827, Mr Bront€e may have met him there. In addition, Patrick was
familiar with the anti-slavery writings of Wilberforce.24 Although the slave trade
had been abolished in 1807, slavery was still practised in the British dominions.
Mr Bront€e joined in a petition with other evangelical clergymen urging the aboli-
tion of slavery itself in 1830.25 Without doubt, slavery was much discussed in
the Bront€e household, and this may explain why it crops up in the imagery in the
sisters’ novels, apart from Agnes Grey.
After Helen Huntingdon’s first abortive attempt to flee her husband, she
reflects, ‘I am a slave’ (TWH, p. 312). On the novel’s theme of marriage, Helen
observes, ‘You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as marry a man you
dislike’ (TWH, p. 317).
William Crimsworth is sensitive to his harsh treatment by his brother and
believes that his acquaintance, Hunsden, ‘could only regard me as a poor-spirited
slave’ (TP, p. 20). In resigning his clerkship, William tells his brother that he has
found the job ‘the most nauseous slavery under the sun’ (TP, p. 36). It is possible
that here Charlotte Bront€e is critiquing the growth of soulless manufacturing
jobs in mills and factories,26 which at this time was observable in the surround-
ing areas of Yorkshire.
Gawthrop argues that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ‘may be linked by a
common but malevolent theme — Caribbean (Indian) Slavery’, when the topic
was ‘the biggest issue of the time’. Gawthrop points out that the wealth of the
Rochester family came from slave labour and concludes that it is possible ‘that
Bertha Mason’s ancestors might have included slaves’. Gawthrop compares the
reader’s shock at the idea of a white Englishman marrying ‘a woman with black
antecedents’, to the shock of Othello marrying Desdemona in Shakespeare’s play.
Locked in the Red-Room, Jane Eyre compares herself with a ‘rebel slave’ (JE,
p. 12) and is in the ‘mood of the revolted slave’ (JE, p. 14). When she has fled
198 HILARY NEWMAN

from the temptation to become Rochester’s mistress, she reflects that her humble
occupation as ‘a village-schoolmistress, free and honest’ is better than being ‘a
slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles’ (JE, p. 359).
In Villette, when Graham Bretton has finally withdrawn from his pursuit of
the coquette Ginevra, he tells Lucy he is no longer the ‘slave’ she formerly
accused him of being, and now disdains his ‘past bondage’ (V, p. 321). This was
apparently in response to an earlier frustrated remark of Lucy’s, in which she
told him that Ginevra was the one subject on which he is ‘but a slave’ (V,
p. 259).
While Gawthrop admits that Emily Bront€e did not definitely indicate that
Heathcliff’s origins were in slavery, nevertheless he makes some telling observa-
tions that might support this idea. He indicates that slaves were simply known
by one name: the slave owner’s attempt to change the identity of the slave and
make him or her more subject. In view of this, that Heathcliff has only one name
could be significant. But Gawthrop’s claim that ‘Heathcliff’s mother is referred to
by Emily as an “Indian queen”’ is misleading.27 This sentence reads rather differ-
ently when it is read within its context. Moreover, ‘Emily’ does not tell us: there
is no direct authorial presence in Wuthering Heights, and her two first-person
narrators are far from reliable. Nelly suggests to Heathcliff that he might have
royal parentage, at a time when he is being rejected by Catherine and maltreated
by Hindley Earnshaw. Nelly wants to encourage him, by telling him how hand-
some he appears after her ministrations, adding that he is ‘fit for a prince in dis-
guise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an
Indian Queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?’ (WH, p. 50). This is pure fantasy on
Nelly’s part. This speech is retrospectively ironic, as Heathcliff will get possession
of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange without the benefit of
royal parentage.
Gawthrop suggests, more convincingly, that Charlottte and Emily Bront€e in
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively use slavery as a wider metaphor.
They both ‘were impeaching systems that allowed, not only white domination of
black, but, in a figurative, and lesser sense, male domination of female, and adult
domination of child’.28 He also links the servants, Joseph and Zillah, into the
slavery theme, by stressing that they have only one name, like Heathcliff. But
Gawthrop fails to quote Nelly’s comment that supports this argument. Nelly’s
dislike of Catherine Earnshaw may have partly arisen because her brother
allowed her, after her first serious illness, to trample on the servants ‘like slaves’
(WH, p. 79).

Physiognomy
In the mid-twentieth century, W.M. Senseman drew attention to the theories of
the Swiss clergyman and poet Johann Kaspar Lavater and those of the Austrian
physiologist Franz Joseph Gall. Lavater theorized on the relationship between
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 199

character and facial features or physiognomy, while Gall popularized ‘skull sci-
ence’ or phrenology.29
‘Physiognomy’ is a word all the Bront€e sisters used. It has been defined in the
following way:
[It is] the art of judging character and disposition from the features of the face or
the form and lineaments of the body generally. This analysis was lent scientific
weight in the nineteenth century by phrenology, which claimed the size or
development of areas of the brain were commensurate with the development of a
certain mental or moral faculty. By examining the cranium, experts claimed to be
able to judge the degree of development of these faculties.30

Graeme Tytler, a contemporary expert on physiognomy in literature, particu-

larly considered the concept as it related to Charlotte, Emily and Anne
Bront€es’ novels. Tytler succinctly defined physiognomy as ‘the art of judging
character from appearance’.31 Tytler has written on the influence of physi-
ognomy on Anne Bront€e’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall;
Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette; and on Emily Bront€e’s
Wuthering Heights. A number of Tytler’s more general remarks on physi-
ognomy as used by the Bront€e sisters will be considered, followed by my
own examples of the concept in their novels.
All the Bront€e sisters use physiognomy to describe characters. Tytler’s opinion
is that Anne Bront€e used the concept of physiognomy in the least sophisticated
way among the Bront€e sisters. It is only in his essay on Anne Bront€e that Tytler
drew attention to a predecessor who popularized the use of physiognomy in his
novels. Sir Walter Scott’s fiction had an ‘extraordinary influence’ on his contem-
poraries and successors, particularly ‘through his highly physiognomic methods
of characterisation’.32 This suggests that Anne was looking backwards to a liter-
ary ancestor, rather than attempting anything new. It is possible that this is a
prejudice against Anne, which has marked much criticism of the Bront€e sisters.
She uses physiognomy in a perfectly competent way. For example, in The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall, Gilbert and Helen are both familiar with it. Gilbert comments
negatively on the physiognomy of a minor character, which he had evidently
observed in some detail (TWH, p. 72). Helen reveals hubris when she claims, ‘I
am an excellent physiognomist, and I always judge of people’s characters by their
looks’ (TWH, p. 115). It might be said that it is Helen’s inadequate mastery of
physiognomy that acts as a catalyst for the unfolding of the plot of The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall.
Charlotte uses physiognomy as a means of judging character more than her sis-
ters. William Crimsworth casually applies the term to minor and major charac-
ters. William describes his employers’ physiognomies: M. Pelet ‘prescribed an
absolute contrast’ (TP, p. 56) to William’s brother, while Mademoiselle Reuter’s
physiognomy apparently changes as she becomes jealous of the attention William
gives to Frances Henri (TP, p. 141). More positively, William reflects on
Frances’s varied physiognomy (TP, p. 185).
200 HILARY NEWMAN

Tytler’s comment on Jane Eyre’s method of assessing people is acute: ‘the

outward person is for Jane almost invariably a fingerpost to the inner
being’.33 Both Jane and Rochester, who are plain to the detached eye, value
beauty highly. But they both discover that conventionally beautiful exteriors
are often lacking in emotional, moral and intellectual beauty. The reverse of
this procedure enables Jane and Rochester to realize each other’s inner
beauty. Early on, catching Jane staring at his physiognomy, Rochester asks
Jane if she thinks him handsome? Without reflecting, Jane immediately blurts
out that she does not. Then Rochester analyses his own ‘physiognomy’ (JE,
pp. 130, 132). As well as an example of the instant concord between
Rochester and Jane, Charlotte Bront€e also uses this discussion of his physi-
ognomy to reveal to both Jane and the reader more of his character. As Jane
Eyre progresses, they move from seeing the plainness of each other to a sub-
jective view of the other’s beauty.
The Rivers all try to read Jane’s physiognomy. One of the sisters remarks that,
when Jane is well, ‘I can fancy her physiognomy would be agreeable’. St John
observes that Jane has ‘rather an unusual physiognomy: certainly, not indicative
of vulgarity of degradation’ (JE, p. 339). Although Jane is destitute at the point,
it is important that she is recognized as a lady. Significantly, St John also com-
ments on her lack of beauty: ‘Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace
and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features’ (JE, p. 339). Rivers
would exploit her as a tool, but never perceive her inner beauty as
Rochester had.
Like Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe in Villette is not beautiful herself and is attracted
by a man who is not conventionally handsome, after having wanted the love of
that fine physical specimen, John Bretton. It is Paul Emanuel who penetrates
Lucy’s cold exterior to perceive her passionate and warm character. Charlotte
Bront€e again queried how far external appearances reflected inner worth. The
outward beauty of Ginevra Fanshawe is not a true reflection of her character
and morals.
Physiognomy is of supreme importance in the life of Lucy Snowe. It is also
a plot device for getting her into an environment where her character can be
further perceived and developed as she is brought into contact with a variety
of people. Madame Beck, uncertain whether to employ Lucy, consults her
kinsman, M. Paul, asking him to read Lucy’s physiognomy (V, p. 131). His
verdict is sufficiently positive to persuade Madame Beck to employ Lucy. M.
Paul must be a good physiognomist, because he recognizes Lucy’s true char-
acter better than anybody else in Villette. Similarly, Lucy is not ‘blind to cer-
tain vigorous characteristics of [M. Paul’s] physiognomy’ (V, p. 290). In a
situation where it is not always possible to converse privately, when Lucy
and M. Paul are in love they can read each other’s physiognomies as indica-
tors of character and compatibility.
Senseman’s conclusion about Charlotte Bront€e’s use of physiognomy
and phrenology is thought-provoking: it does not constitute ‘a significant
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 201

technical contribution to the art of character-drawing, but it shows

at least her ready response to certain contemporary interests and
assumptions’.34
Tytler’s conclusion about the relative use of physiognomy made by Charlotte
and Emily Bront€e is undeniable: ‘physiognomy is hardly as conspicuous in
Wuthering Heights as it in Charlotte Bront€e’s novels, which abound in physio-
gnomical (and phrenological) references and descriptions’.35 Lockwood employs
the term on his first visit to the Heights, when he is unpopular with both the
human and animal occupants. Left alone with the dogs, Lockwood entertains
himself by making faces at them, until ‘some turn of my physiognomy so irritated
[the bitch], that she suddenly broke into a fury’ (WH, p. 4). The dogs’ subsequent
attack on Lockwood is an image of the internecine conflict that exists at
Wuthering Heights between the people there.
Emily Bront€e is more democratic than her sisters: not only does the southern,
city-bred, educated Lockwood use the word, but also the servant/housekeeper,
Nelly Dean. She comments on Hareton’s ‘physiognomy’: ‘Good things lost amid
a wilderness of weeds, to be sure, whose rankness far over-topped their neglected
growth; yet, notwithstanding, evidence of a wealthy soil that might yield luxuri-
ant crops under other and favourable circumstances’ (WH, pp. 173–74).
Although we may doubt the likelihood of Nelly knowing about physiognomy,
her metaphorical description of Hareton is important, for he will become the
hero of the second generation and husband of the gently reared Cathy. Nelly’s
perception is validated.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many similarities among the novels of the Bront€e sisters.
Apart from Shirley, all the novels use first-person narrator(s) in a way reminis-
cent of Chinese boxes, with the novels sharing or using variations of each other
in their narrative techniques. Loving animals as they did, it was natural to the
Bront€e sisters to use animal imagery and to use incidents with animals to convey
characters and their relationships. The Bront€es all loved their Haworth home and
its surrounding landscape. The novels are marked with natural imagery, revealing
their observations of plants, trees and the weather. The last word will be given to
a nineteenth-century voice:
That Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were supposed to be products of the
same mind as Jane Eyre, is not to be wondered at. It was a new genius of
writing which came to us from those northern moors, and we at first failed to
distinguish the different species. The circumstances surrounding the sisters had
been for the most part the same, and these gave a like colour to their unlike
characters.36
202 HILARY NEWMAN
Notes
1 17
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bront€e
(London: Smith, Elder, 1857); Elizabeth Gaskell,
The Life and Works of Charlotte Bront€e and
her Sisters, Volume VII (London: Smith, Elder,
1909), pp. 316–17.
2 19
The Letters of Charlotte Bront€e, Volume I:
1829–1847, ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995); letter to Miss Wooler,
30 January 1846, p. 447; hereafter Letters.
3
Charlotte Bront€e, The Professor (Oxford: OUP,
1992), p. 11; hereafter TP.
4
Anne Bront€e, Agnes Grey (Oxford: OUP, 2010),
p. 106; hereafter AG.
5
Anonymous, ‘Novels of the Season 1848’,
reprinted in The Bront€e Sisters, Critical
Assessments, ed. by Eleanor McNees, I
(Mountfield: Helm Information, 1996), 156;
first published in the North American Review,
67. 141, October 1848, 354–60.
6
F.H. Langman, Wuthering Heights, reprinted in
The Bront€e Sisters, Critical Assessments, II, 318.
7
Mary Jacobus, ‘Feminism and Romanticism in
Villette’, Women Writing and Writing about
Women, ed. by Mary Jacobus (London: Croom
Helm, 1979), p. 43.
8 p. 188.
Linda Hunt, ‘Villette: The Inward and the
Outward Life’, reprinted in The Bront€e Sisters,
Critical Assessments, III, 690.
9 Gawthrop, p. 281.
Ellen Nussey, ‘Reminiscences of Charlotte
Bront€e’, reprinted in The Bront€e Sisters, Critical
Assessments, I, 111.
10
Anne Bront€e, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 17; hereafter TWH.
11
Charlotte Bront€e, Jane Eyre (Oxford: OUP,
2000), p. 239; hereafter JE.
12
Charlotte Bront€e, Villette, ed. by Kate Lawson
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press,
2006), p. 211; hereafter V.
13
Emily Bront€e, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: OUP,
2009), p. 50; hereafter WH.
14
Maureen B. Adams, ‘Emily Bront€e and Dogs:
Transformation within the Human-Dog Bond’,
Bront€e Studies, 29.1 (2004), 43–52 (p. 46).
15
Graeme Tytler, ‘Animals in Wuthering Heights’,
Bront€e Studies, 27.2 (2002), 121–130 (p. 128).
16
Lisa Surridge, ‘Animals and Violence in
Wuthering Heights’, Bront€e Society Transactions,
24.2 (1999), 161–173 (pp. 162–163).
Notes on contributor
Hilary Newman gained BA and MPhil degrees at Goldsmiths’ College London. She
is an independent scholar and her research has been published in our pages. She has
Surridge, p. 170.
18
Emily Roberson Wallace, ‘Caged Eagles,
Songsters and Carrion-Seekers: Birds in Jane
Eyre and Wuthering Heights’, Bront€e Studies,
41.3 (2016), 249–60 (p. 258).
Kathleen Anderson and Heather R. Lawrence,
‘“No net ensnares me”: Bird Imagery and the
Dynamics of Dominance and Submission in
Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre’, Bront€e Studies,
40.3 (2015), 240–51 (p. 240).
20
Wallace, p. 58.
21
Letters; letter to Ellen Nussey, 21 December
1839, p. 206.
22
Extracts from the Prefatory Note to ‘Selections
from Poems by Ellis Bell’, Appendix 1,
Wuthering Heights, pp. 311–12.
23
Rebecca Chesney, ‘The Bront€e Weather Project
2011–2012’, Bront€e Studies, 39.1 (2014), 14–31
(p. 14).
24
Humphrey Gawthrop, ‘Slavery: Idee Fixe of
Emily and Charlotte Bront€e’ (2003), Bront€e
Studies, 38.4 (2013), 281–89 (p. 282).
25
See Dudley Green, Patrick Bront€e: Father of
Genius (Stroud: The History Press, 2010),
26
Gawthrop, pp. 281, 282, 287.
27
Gawthrop, p. 281.
28
29
W.M. Senseman, ‘Charlotte Bront€e’s Use of
Physiognomy and Phrenology’, Bront€e Society
Transactions, 12.4 (1954), 286–89 (p. 287).
30
Charlotte Bront€e, Villette, editorial footnote 2,
p. 131.
31
Graeme Tytler, ‘Physiognomy in Anne Bront€e’s
Fiction’, Bront€e Studies, 37.3 (2012), 227–37
(p. 227).
32
Tytler, ‘Physiognomy in Anne Bront€e’s Fiction’,
p. 228.
33
Graeme Tytler, ‘Physiognomy and the Treatment
of Beauty in Jane Eyre’, Bront€e Studies, 41.4
(2016), 300–11 (p. 301).
34
Senseman, p. 289.
35
Graeme Tytler, ‘Physiognomy in Wuthering
Heights’, Bront€e Society Transactions, 21.4
(1994), 137–48 (p. 137).
36
A.J., ‘The Three Sisters’, reprinted in The
Bront€e Sisters, Critical Assessments, I, 215.
 € SISTERS’ NOVELS
SOME COMMON FEATURES IN THE BRONTE 203

written numerous articles on Virginia Woolf and has published eight monographs in
Cecil Woolf’s ‘Bloomsbury Heritage Series’ on Virginia Woolf and her circle. More
recently, she has been a published contributor on Charles and Mary Lamb and their
circle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s children and their joint circle. Henry Crabb
Robinson has been a particular interest.
Correspondence to: Hilary Newman. Email: hilarynewmanuk@hotmail.co.uk