Anne Brontë: The Other One

IAnne Bront%: The Other One is the first full-length study to provide a feminist reading of the life and work of this youngest Bront%. In the Bront% mythology of three talented, intimate, and devoted sisters, Anne has played, in George Moore's words, the role of 'literary Cinderella, ' relegated to the ashes of history for her failure to reach the standards set by her sisters. Elizabeth Langland demonstrates that the sisterly context, which enabled the work of all three, has proved detrimental to a full critical appreciation of Anne. Measured by the standards of Emily and Charlotte, Anne's work must inevitably suffer. Through a close examination of the life, poetry, and novels, Elizabeth Langland shows that Anne's work drew its inspiration from a different literary tradition than that which influenced her sisters and, further, that Anne's novels and poems, in fact, offer a stringent critique of the values inherent in her sisters' works. In detailing the literary debt Charlotte, in particular, owed her youngest sister and in demonstrating the intertextual relationships among all the Bront% novels, Professor Langland presents a genuinely revisionary perspective on Anne Bront%. In key chapters on the poetry, R Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Professor Langland argues persuasively that we revise upward our critical estimate of this 'literary Cinderella.' Contents: 1. Anne Bront%'s Life: 'age and experience'; 2. Influences: 'Action Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis Bell'; 3. The Poems: 'pillars of witness'; 4. Agnes Grey: 'all true histories contain instruction'; 5. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: 'wholesome truths' versus 'soft nonsense'; 6. Critics on Anne Bront%: a 'literary Cinderella'; Note on Texts; Notes; Bibliography; Index R