The Shelleyan Brontës: Mary and Percy Shelley in the Work of the Brontës

This book explores the significant textual relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley and the early works of the Brontë siblings. Through a detailed examination of the Shelleyan narrative accessible to the Brontës from their childhood to their final novels, this study argues for a fresh perspective on the Brontës’ engagement with the Shelleys in both their juvenilia and later seven novels. In this respect, the book considers the Brontës 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 Brontës’ writing from childhood, with Mary epitomising the model for what the sisters would eventually become: the female novelist.

Julie Elizabeth Young is an alumna of the University of Cambridge, currently working as independent researcher. As a teaching affiliate, she has taught undergraduate students at the University of Nottingham. She has also undertaken professional archival research in British universities, in archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and in an archive in Paris.