May Sinclair and the Brontë myth: rewilding and dissocializing Charlotte

Abstract

This article surveys May Sinclair’s writing on the Brontë sisters in order to chart her revisionist impulse with relation to their reputation, her anxiety about her own literary reputation, genius in women and intellectual self-sufficiency. I argue that in her insistence on the significance of Haworth and the moors as “background” to the sisters’ lives and her careful portrayal of each sister as either “savage” or “half savage” she is establishing the sisters as Romantic geniuses on the one hand and as dissocialized and self-sufficient elemental figures on the other. I move from an examination of Sinclair’s revisioning of Gaskell’s Brontë myth and her engagement with Clement Shorter and the Héger-Brussels question, to a reading of two of her novels in which Sinclair’s own version of the Brontë myth – the untamed intellect of the genius woman in communion with the landscape – is explored. I will draw on the new materialism of recent feminist ecocriticism to argue that, for Sinclair, the cultural and intellectual work of writing is environmentally and materially informed. Sinclair is at pains to show that the Brontë sisters themselves, and Sinclair’s own fictional writer-heroines, can escape essentially uncompromised from domestic and social materiality, and maintain communion with a different kind of materiality: the sacred materiality of landscape.