{"title":"Multiple voices on the manuscript of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë","authors":"Lucy Hanks","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2107417","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"“I am in the Hornet’s nest with a vengeance” (Gaskell 1997b, 453) is how Elizabeth Gaskell described the reception of her 1857 biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (LCB). It is a fitting image to describe the indignation which met some of the memoir’s portraits of people associated with Charlotte Brontë during her life. The fact that Gaskell considered this reaction as “vengeance” indicates how, in the process of writing the memoir, she believed that her personal reputation was tied up and associated with Brontë’s to the point that she felt victimised by the controversy surrounding it. However distressing the memoir’s reception was for Gaskell, though, it was not unexpected. She used the “Hornet’s nest” image to explain how this social awareness influenced her sometimes inconsistent approach to writing the memoir in a letter after its publication:","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"44 1","pages":"417 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2107417","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
“I am in the Hornet’s nest with a vengeance” (Gaskell 1997b, 453) is how Elizabeth Gaskell described the reception of her 1857 biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (LCB). It is a fitting image to describe the indignation which met some of the memoir’s portraits of people associated with Charlotte Brontë during her life. The fact that Gaskell considered this reaction as “vengeance” indicates how, in the process of writing the memoir, she believed that her personal reputation was tied up and associated with Brontë’s to the point that she felt victimised by the controversy surrounding it. However distressing the memoir’s reception was for Gaskell, though, it was not unexpected. She used the “Hornet’s nest” image to explain how this social awareness influenced her sometimes inconsistent approach to writing the memoir in a letter after its publication:
伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔(Elizabeth Gaskell,1997b,453)描述了她1857年的传记《夏洛特·勃朗特的一生》(the Life of Charlotte Brontë,LCB)受到欢迎的情景。这是一个恰当的形象来描述回忆录中一些与夏洛特·勃朗特有关的人在其一生中所表现出的愤慨。盖斯凯尔认为这种反应是“复仇”,这一事实表明,在撰写回忆录的过程中,她认为自己的个人声誉与勃朗特的声誉息息相关,以至于她觉得自己受到了围绕这本回忆录的争议的伤害。尽管这本回忆录受到了盖斯凯尔的欢迎,但这并不意外。她在回忆录出版后的一封信中用“黄蜂窝”的形象解释了这种社会意识是如何影响她有时不一致的写作方式的:
期刊介绍:
Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.