Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology

This innovative and critically acclaimed study successfully challenges the traditional view that Charlotte Bront existed in a historical vacuum by setting her work firmly within the context of Victorian psychological debate. Based on extensive local research using texts ranging from local newspaper copy to the medical tomes in the Reverend Patrick Bront''s library Sally Shuttleworth explores the interpenetration of economic social and psychological discourse in the early and mid-nineteenth century and traces the ways in which Charlotte Bront''s texts operate in relation to this complex often contradictory discursive framework. Shuttleworth offers a detailed analysis of Bront''s fiction informed by a new understanding of Victorian constructions of sexuality and insanity and the operations of medical and psychological surveillance.