The child and the letter: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This essay engages with the question of childhood in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Despite narrating a conflict concerning child custody, childhood is a subject rarely broached by the critics of the text. Indeed, the only instance of the child being addressed in criticism grants it the power to enclose potentially subversive narrative. This is a function attributed to the framing structure of the novel by other critics. This essay returns the child to Brontë’s text as a disruptive rather than containing force. Through a detailed close analysis of the novel I track such disruptions, and the extent to which these point to wider theoretical or methodological difficulties in critical accounts of childhood and absence in literature. The essay makes interventions into psychoanalysis, childhood studies, and the discourse of ‘framing’ within C19th literature.

Resistance, regard and rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie

This article discusses the literary relationship of the novelist and memoirist,Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), and her step-niece, Virginia Woolf.Ritchie’s influence was a highly significant one which prompted a powerful ambiguity in Woolf, who was alternately admiring and dismissively anxious to deny influence, eager to relegate her to a staunchly Victorian past while covertly sensitive to those elements in her writing linking her with Modernism. These ‘Modern’ elements, including emphasis on the subjective nature of reality and the everyday life of the mind, occur in Ritchie’s fiction, affecting its style and structure. This article focuses on Night and Day, then on Woolf ’s more direct comments about Ritchie in diaries, letters and essays, comparing these comments and Woolf ’s theoretical agenda in defining Modernism and, implicitly, her own place in it. It also considers some of Ritchie’s fiction, with particular attention to two novellas, one a source for To The Lighthouse.