Brontes as Gothic Writers

This book is the first extended study of the importance of Gothic for an appreciation of the Brontes' writing. It resituates Gothic from the mode that gives the pleasing sensation of terror to being the source of the Brontes' deepest preoccupations - it is the mode they use to register anxieties and fears. This monograph, through a consideration of Gothic states and places, explores the Brontes' creative work with the genre. The author argues that to read the Brontes as Gothic poets and novelists is also to read them as post-Romantics, as they respond to the Gothic imaginations of such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Gothic in the Brontes, then, is not merely a collection of tropes or even an aesthetic, but a way in which they read the world.