ABSTRACT
In her discussion of the relationships between the Brontës’ experiences of art and their writing, Jane Sellars notes that Thomas Bewick was “the artist-hero of the Brontës’ childhood.”1 By attracting the young Jane Eyre to the vignettes in Bewick’s History of British Birds, then, Charlotte Brontë recreated as an adult an important artistic experience she had shared with her siblings in childhood. Commentators on artists and art in Jane Eyre have placed the novel’s opening Bewick material in the contexts of Jane’s interest and work in art or have more generally discussed the impact of Charlotte’s earlier collaborations with Branwell. Yet, interestingly, Charlotte’s enduring fascination with Bewick diverges from that of her brother, Branwell, as this essay will demonstrate. This divergence marks a departure from the two siblings’ youthful collaboration on the Angrian stories: as Beverley Southgate has put it, this early partnership was one of “Minds Cast in the Same Mould.”2 Commentators have not yet considered the Bewick episode of the novel in relation to Branwell’s writings and drawings concerning the artist; nor have they investigated the pertinence of Branwell to Jane’s role as artist, art viewer, and highly pictorial “autobiographer.”
