Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: A Casebook

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: A Casebook. Elsie B. Michie, editor. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]45.00. viii + 212 pages. ISBN 0-19-517778-9. This new volume in O.U.P.'s Casebooks in Criticism originated with O.U.P. New York. It includes an introduction by the editor and nine essays examining the novel and its author from a variety of perspectives: 'Reading Bronte's Novels: The Confessional Tradition' by Carol Bock; 'Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism' by Cora Kaplan; 'The Advertisement of Jane Eyre' by Ronald Thomas; 'Excerpts from Allegories of Empire' by Jenny Sharpe; 'Jane Eyre: "Lurid Hieroglyphics"' by Sally Shuttleworth; '"Dreadful to Me": Jane Eyre and History' by Heather Glen; 'Excerpts from Subjects on Display' by Beth Newman; '"That Stormy Sisterhood": Portrait of the Brontes' by Helena Michie; 'Jane Eyre in Later Lives: Intertextual Strategies in Women's Self-Definition' by Patsy Stoneman and 'Romance and Anti-Romance: from Bronte's Jane Eyre to Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea' by Joyce Carol Oates.

There is, finally, a list of suggested titles for students of Charlotte Bronte's works. (R.M.)