Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alisa M. Clapp

Critical Essay by Alisa M. Clapp

SOURCE: “The Tenant of Patriarchal Culture: Anne Brontë's Problematic Female Artist,” in Michigan Academician, Vol. 28, No. 2, March, 1996, pp. 113-22.

In the following essay, Clapp evaluates Helen Huntingdon as a marginalized, and hence paradigmatic, Victorian female artist.

Unlike many writers in history, Anne Brontë has had the misfortune not to be unknown by literary critics but to be ignored. We know that she was the youngest sister of Charlotte and Emily, and even that she was a writer, but we rarely look at what she wrote. Even scholarship devoted to “the Brontë sisters” often fails to include the work of the youngest.¹

Scholars suggest that much of Anne Brontë's obscurity derives from Charlotte herself, whose written “apologies” for Anne's novels and her obstruction of a reprint edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall hurt Anne's reputation both then and now. Many Brontë biographers followed Charlotte's lead in pronouncing...
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