Marianne Thormählen

An edited volume commissioned by Cambridge University Press was published in November 2012 under the title The Brontës in Context; it is now out in paperback. The book consists of 42 short chapters on all sorts of topics of interest to Brontë readers – from secondary-school pupils to researchers – who want to know more about the authors and their works viewed in the mid-nineteenth-century context. It has chapters about schools and professions, clothes and pleasures, religion and philosophy, politics, sexuality and family life. I have written the chapters on marriage, farming and industry.

I recently (2014) published a somewhat revisionist article on 'Christian Ethics in Wuthering Heights' (available online; just Google the title and it comes up).

Within the framework of a long-term project, I'm studying early-twentieth-century English poetry on the basis of a contention that the handbook distinction between ‘modernists’ and ‘traditional/Georgian’ poets is a latter-day academic construct: modernity happened to, and precoccupied, everyone who wrote poetry, and everyone was deeply concerned about his/her place in tradition. The leading modernist, T. S. Eliot, was not the greatest because he was a modernist (the question of his sole rival W. B. Yeats’s ‘modernist’ status is a vexed subject), but because like nobody else, he found words for modern man’s and woman’s fumbling for something to hold on to in life.