The Shelleyan Bronts

This book explores the significant textual relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley and the early works of the Bront siblings. Through a detailed examination of the Shelleyan narrative accessible to the Bronts from their childhood to their final novels, this study argues for a fresh perspective on the Bronts' engagement with the Shelleys in both their juvenilia and later seven novels. In this respect, the book considers the Bronts as readers rather than exclusively as writers, viewing them as a product of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace which maintained affinities to Romanticism. Reading, rewriting, and appropriating the textual Shelleys was a fundamental vein stemming the Bronts writing from childhood, with Mary epitomising the model for what the sisters would eventually become: the female novelist.