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A Stranger Within the Gates: Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Irishness, by Kathleen Constable; pp. xvi + 170. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000, $52.00, $32.50 paper.
The Brontes and Religion, by Marianne Thormahlen; pp. x + 287. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 40.00, $60.00.
Marianne Thormahlen's contention in her introduction to The Brontes and Religion, that the Christian life is a foreign country to most people today" although "to the Brontes it was home" (9) suggests that her exploration of that home has much in common with Kathleen Constable's study of Charlotte Bronte's ties to Ireland. Taken together, however, the two books provide not a map to any lost Brontean homeland, spiritual or colonial, but rather a context in which to understand the isolated and restless migrant characters who populate Bronte fiction.
Constable combines the biographical and the literary to outline what she sees as an Irish consciousness in Charlotte Bronte's life and her novel, Jane Eyre (1847). Like Terry Eagleton's Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), Constable's work speculates on how father Patrick Bronte's Irish roots might have affected his daughters' fiction. Unlike Eagleton, Constable does not use her study to launch a wider exploration of the challenges of narrating Irish experience. Remaining firmly fixed on Charlotte Bronte, she focuses primarily on unearthing the Irish details of an English literary life. Constable's attention to Charlotte's hero-worship of the Irish-born Lord Wellington, and her connection of the Bronze juvenilia to Samuel Ferguson's exactly contemporary Irishized version of Arabian Nights (1834) in Dublin University Magazine (to which the Bronte household subscribed) provide two of the most effective moments in the book, implying similarities between, on the one hand, Charlotte's paradoxical rage both for liberty and for aristocratic hierarchy, and, on the other hand, Irish agitation both for selfdetermination and for inclusion in the British Empire.
The range of Constable's Irish evidence, from Gaelic linguistic evolution, to Dublin periodicals, to ancient Celtic myth cycles builds a case for Celtic-Bronte connections too rich for any scholar of Victorian literature to ignore. Yet by focusing her energy on establishing the existence of a connection rather than drawing out its implications, Constable undercuts the effectiveness of her evidence. She offers a painstaking analysis of the similarities...