SOURCE: “Incest and Rage in Charlotte Brontë's Novelettes,” in Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing, edited by Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp, State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 61-77.

In the following essay, Carlson offers a close reading of Brontë's novelettes written between 1836 and 1839 and theorizes that the secret of Angria that Brontë created for her works allowed her to create a safe space and outlet for her forbidden fantasies of father-daughter seduction and female masochism.

Charlotte Brontë, between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three, created a secret fantasy world called Angria, a world that she constructed in hundreds of pages of tiny manuscripts that make up her juvenilia (Alexander, Early Writings 3). Brontë did not write these alone; until 1833 the stories were a joint venture with her two sisters, Anne and Emily, and her brother Branwell (Alexander, Early Writings 62), and the later works, including...