The Brontës and Illustration: Private Sketches and Public Representations

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationships between the work of the Brontë sisters and their illustrators, from the first illustrated edition in 1872 of Jane Eyre to the 2022 graphic reimagining Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg. The chapter also considers the sisters as illustrators of their own writings, contextualising Emily Brontë’s diary papers as unique visualisations of the Brontës at work, which point simultaneously to their lives in Haworth Parsonage and their creativity as writers and artists. This is accompanied by an outline of the complex history of book illustration involving commercial imperatives that emphasise the Brontës’ novels as popular romances, along with both serious and comic attempts to reconfigure or revise aspects of their narratives. The work of each illustrator, unsurprisingly, speaks to their own time rather than reflecting the period when the Brontës’ works were first published. The chapter maps the ways in which illustrators have subsequently elided the sisters’ biographies, works and the landscapes (real and imagined) in which they lived and in which their works were set, contributing to the creation of hybrid identities that remain current, popular and profitable today.