Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology

This ground-breaking study successfully challenges the traditional tendency to regard Charlotte Bronte as having existed in a historical vacuum. Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontes, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Bronte’s texts operate in relation to this complex framework. Shuttleworth offers a reading of Bronte’s fiction informed by a new understanding of the psychological debates of her time.