The Brontë Mysteries series by Bella Ellis

Abstract

discussed in the volume is the style of correlative and comparative writing that recurs in almost all chapters. Be it comparing two great Bront€e novels likeWuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, or realism and modernism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, or Keats’ Ode to Nightingale and Ode to Autumn, the literary interrelationships between different authors, and between works by the same author pieced together in this volume hold particularly intriguing scholarly importance and also paint a resourceful picture of authors’ literary career transitions. In chapter five, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is used as a platform to understand unconscious intertextuality in Victorian era literary works. Drawing profoundly from the book’s impactful Dickensian narrative, Jacobs makes some crucial observations hinting at incestuous relationships in Victorian novels like Wuthering Heights and even Great Expectations, while also touching on concepts like ‘othering’ as was visible in characters like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, or ‘notions of human-making and self-making’ (p. 57), as is central to relationship-building in Victorian bildungsromane. Identifying queering of text in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter eight brings out examples from the novel that represent queerness as ‘at once invisible and obvious’ (p. 81), leaving readers to revisit and tackle the many homo-erotic descriptors in the novel and opening up a nuanced discussion of queer reading of texts. Revisiting this novel in today’s day and age in which LGBTQþ awareness and inclusion has gained more momentum than ever before is a testament to the universality and classical quality of literary interpretation, an idea that is advanced through this volume of lectures. Another telling characteristic in the book is the multitude of unheard stories that are strewn about the chapters for the reader to discover – like the story of how Jean Rhys’ rather neglected work Good Morning, Midnight borrows its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, and how ‘it’s heartening to think that Rhys was reading Dickinson in the 1930s’ (p. 153). Being a collection of lectures, the tone of the book right from the introduction is one that nurtures an interaction, a lively engagement between the author and the readers, and more deeply with its literary subjects. From lesser-known scholarly interpretations, to Jacobs’ personal experiences of reading and the rhetoric of reading, there is a very prominent, almost celebratory appreciation of literature and its power to influence critical, societal thought. While it may be out of the scope of this review to discuss all seventeen chapters from the book in detail, it can be said with certainty that this fascinatingly detailed, accessible, wide-ranging volume is of immense scholarly value for students, academics, and any lover of literature, and shall remain so for years to come.