ABSTRACT
Byronic romanticization of anti-social and revolutionary impulses was a catalyst prompting Charlotte Bronte’s feminist ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’. From the very beginning of her writing life this romantic feminism was in dialectic with an ideological imperative which was definitively reactionary, being passionately loyalist. Lord Byron’s celebrity stimulated the Brontës’ literary ambition; his narrative poetry encouraged them to take the genre of the novel seriously as art; and—in Charlotte’s case—to infuse it with passionate fictionalized autobiography. It is a commonplace to compare Heathcliff and Bertha Mason Rochester to Byronic anti-heroes. The Poet Laureate Robert Southey had assumed Charlotte’s was ‘a fictitious signature’ when she had written to him in 1837, confessing her literary ambition and possibly enclosing ‘a long Byronic poem’ in ottava rima. The name ‘Bronte’ signalled patriotic support of empire: and points to the significance of Charlotte choosing as mentor the Anglican polemicist Southey.
