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This thesis attempts to clarify how the authors incorporated their theological beliefs in their writing to more clearly discover, although modern audiences often enjoy both authors, why Charlotte Bronte was unimpressed with Jane Austen. The thesis is an examination of the ways in which Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte interact with the Evangelical Reformation within the Anglican Church in their novels Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre, respectively. Both authors, as daughters of Anglican clergymen, were aware of and influenced by the movement, but at varying degrees. This project begins with a brief explanation of the state of the Anglian Church and beginnings of the Evangelical Reformation. The thesis then examines George Austen's influence on his daughter and the characters and text of Mansfield Park to observe the ways in which traditional Anglicanism and tenets of Evangelicalism are discussed in the novel, revealing more clearly where Austen's personal beliefs aligned. Similarly, the project then analyzes Patrick Bronte's influence on Charlotte Bronte and evaluates the characters and text of Jane Eyre to mark the significance of the Evangelical movement on Charlotte Bronte. After studying these works and religious components of their lives, the thesis argues that Austen's traditionally Anglican subtlety with the subject of religion did not appeal to Bronte's passion for the subject, clearly inspired by the Evangelical Reformation. / Master of Arts / Charlotte Brontë was unimpressed with the writing of Jane Austen, which is surprising as the audience for one author usually also enjoys the other author as well. Although the specific reason for Brontë’s distaste for Austen is unknown, this thesis proposes that Brontë disagreed with how Austen portrayed Evangelicalism. Both Brontë and Austen were Anglican clergymen’s daughters, and they both grew up with an awareness of the Evangelical Reformation occurring in the Anglican Church. Brontë was influenced by the movement more, which this thesis shows after first outlining the Evangelical Reformation, exploring Austen’s relationship with it and how it appears in Mansfield Park, and then examining Brontë’s relationship with the Reformation and how it appears in Jane Eyre as well. This thesis contains brief historical and biographical sketches of the authors and their families, literary examinations of the novels Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre to study how the authors interacted with the Evangelical ideals, and an analysis that looks at faith in these two novels in a comparative way to explain why Brontë might have disagreed with and therefore disliked Austen’s writing.

This dissertation aims to examine the various ways in which three Victorian novels, such as Wilkie Collins?s The Woman in White (1860), Anne Bront�?s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Bront�?s Villette (1853), address the relationship between storytelling and self-formation, showing that a subject formulates a sense of self by storytelling. The constructed nature of self and storytelling in Collins?s The Woman in White shows that narrative is a significant way of attributing meaning in our lives and that constructing stories about self is connected to the construction of self, illustrating that storytelling is a form of self-formation. Anne Bront�?s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall exemplifies Bront�?s configuration of the relational and contextual aspect of storytelling and self-formation in her belief that self is formed not merely through the story he/she tells but through the triangular relationship of the storyteller, the story, and the reader. This novel proves that even though the writer?s role in constructing his/her self-concept through his/her narrative is important, the narrator?s triangular relationship with the reader and the text is also a significant component in his/her self-formation. Charlotte Bront�?s Villette is concerned with unnarration, in which the narrative does not say, and it shows that the unnarrated elements provide useful resource for the display of the narrator?s self. For Charlotte Bront�, unnarration is part of the narrative configuration that contributes to constructing and presenting the storyteller?s self-formation. These three novels illuminate that narrative is more than linguistic activities of the symbolic representation of the world, and that it cannot be fully conceived without taking into consideration the storyteller?s experience and thoughts of the world.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

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My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of the plight of plainer women can be traced by contrasting novels written early in the century with novels written mid-century. I argue that beauty gained more significance for young women in nineteenth-century England because the marriage ideal shifted, a shift which especially influenced the upper and middle class. The eighteenth century brought into marriage concepts such as Rousseau's "wife-farm principle" the idea that a man chooses a significantly younger child-bride, mentoring and molding her into the woman he needs. But by the end of the century the ideal of marriage moved to the companionate ideal, which opted for an equal partnership. That ideal was based on the conception that marriage was based on personal happiness hence should be founded on compatibility and love. The companionate ideal became more influential as individuality reigned among the Romantics. The new ideal of companionate marriage limited parents' influence on their children's choice of spouse to the extent that the choice lay now largely with young men. Yet that choice was constrained because young men and women were restricted by social conventions, their social interaction limited. Thus, according to my reading of nineteenth-century authors, the companionate ideal was a charade, as young men were not able to get to know women well enough to determine whether or not they were compatible. So instead of getting to know a young woman's character and her personality, they distinguished potential brides mainly on the basis of appearance.

The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.