ABSTRACT

Shortly after finishing the manuscript now known as her Farewell to Angria (1839), Charlotte Brontë began a narrative that transposes the central themes and characters of her Angrian tales into early Victorian Yorkshire. Ashworth, a fragment that remained unpublished during her lifetime, is a deliberate attempt to move her narratives into a realistic format and an everyday contemporary setting, while retaining the mixture of Gothic elements, Romantic tropes, and tales of dark passion that continued to inform Charlotte Brontë’s writing. The tale seamlessly translates the Angrian villain Alexander Percy into an irresponsible Yorkshire squire, yet simultaneously anticipates the structure and theme of The Professor, which was published posthumously in 1857. A reassessment of this early narrative therefore also reveals to what extent The Professor, and subsequently, Villette (1853) – often in turn considered a reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s first full-scale novel – are grounded in the world of Angria. The effects of industrialization and the resulting class concerns may provide the larger context of the two brothers’ antagonism in The Professor, but their innate hostility is rooted in the passionate conflicts that structure the Angrian tales, and this is what lends force to the described clashes. There is a significant continuity in Charlotte Brontë’s representation of sibling conflicts that prompts us to reconsider the extent to which her early writing informs her mature works. In reassessing the significance of one of Charlotte Brontë’s rarely discussed works, I contend, we can also trace her changing representation of, and yet continued fascination with, contrasting sibling pairs.1