Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and the Mentor-Lover

P. Menon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780230512047
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The Mentor-Lover in the Eighteenth Century – Novel, Conduct Book and Archetype
• 1 “Saturated with the Platonic Idea”? Judgment and Passion in Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Emma
• 2 Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park: “At Once Both Tragedy and Comedy”
• 3 “Slave of a Fixed and Dominant Idea”: Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings – Preliminaries or Precursors?
• 4 “Should We Try to Counteract This Influence?” Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette
• 5 George Eliot and “The Clerical Sex”: From Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch
• 6 “Worth Nine-Tenths of the Sermons”? The Author as Mentor-Lover in Daniel Deronda
• Epilogue: The Author, the Reader and the “imaged solution”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index