This chapter reveals that Charlotte Bronte was deeply preoccupied with the movement of people and capital across global space, as well as with visions of restrictive local place. It moves on to focus upon Bronte's topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of the friendship and correspondence with Mary Taylor, the model for Shirley's Rose Yorke, which informed Shirley's production and conception. Shirley returns to themes of female mobility, migration and work in subtler and more peripheral ways. Following Elizabeth Gaskell's defence of her friend's posthumous reputation in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Bronte has frequently been associated with ideas of static and feminised local place, the dutiful daughter at home who, after death, haunted Haworth. The chapter seeks to restore critical attention to elements of mobility and global awareness within Bronte's writing.

This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analysis of three very different Brontean afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant, Jasper Fforde and Gail Jones. Sharing the obsession of neo-Victorian theory with spectres, Tennant's oeuvre is 'haunted by the influential ghosts of other stories'. Thornfield Hall is no exception, summoning not only both 'pretexts' but also the reader's awareness of the interplay between Charlotte Bronte's and Rhys's novels. Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, offers two worlds: a 1980s Britain, where the Crimean War has continued for over 130 years; and the world of Bronte's novel as a space available for textual exchange and literary tourism. Gail Jones's Sixty Lights, a complex refiguration of narrative inheritance and exploration of what is obscured behind 'memorable patterns', deals with the modes of intergenerational and global migrations of meaning that have affected cultural understandings of Jane Eyre since 1847.

This chapter traces women writers' reinterpretations and reworkings of Charlotte Bronte's 'feminist voice' between 1910 and 1940. Margaret Oliphant identified the surplus woman debates as key to interpreting Bronte's depictions of 'that solitude and longing of women', explicitly linking heroines such as Lucy Snowe to 'the extra halfmillion of women' in Victorian society. In their critiques of the Victorian family, inter-war feminist writers often took their cue from the progressive views on the freedoms of female singleness expressed in Bronte's letters, while questioning Elizabeth Gaskell's apparent endorsement of a daughter's duty. The chapter considers political and auto/biographical writing by Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair and Vera Brittain, before focusing on the new spinster heroines of modernist novels such as Sinclair's The Three Sisters and Winifred Holtby's The Crowded Street.

Jane Eyre has been remodelled for audiences with varying cultural backgrounds, thus proving the status of the novel as a Western classic. Literary mash-ups, graphic novels and web series have been added to the repertoire of texts that strengthen Jane's transmedia presence. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre follows in the footsteps of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which won an Emmy in 2013 for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media. The novel's theatrical presence was soon accompanied by wide-screen adaptations: from silent movies, through classic adaptations, to more recent experimental filmic versions. The web series as multimedia form offers unparalleled opportunities for the adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's novel. This new type of seriality has, from the start, been associated with confessionality in contemporary culture and with questions of authenticity, authorship and access within a shared and sharing digital economy.

This chapter analyses how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Bronte during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by the accounts of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, both of whom travelled to Yorkshire to find evidence of Charlotte Bronte's life and to assess her legacy as an author. Woolf 's career began with a journey to Charlotte Bronte's home, a literary pilgrimage described in an ironic register, a distinct break with the emotional and reverential accounts of her predecessors. While Bronte's literary legacy ostensibly provided the rationale for the 'Charlotte' cult, her texts did not actually seem to be sufficient for many of her devotees. Many Victorian pilgrims, like Harland, recorded feeling a thrill of presence and friendly connection to Charlotte Bronte in Haworth.

Pilate's Wife's Dream', the first poem in the Charlotte Brontes' first published work, Poems by Currer Ellis and Acton Bell, meditates on the relationship between past and future, life and afterlife. Charlotte's 'attempts' at achieving an afterlife for her poetry in her early novels explore this relationship via a set of intertextual exchanges that perform the failure of the Romantic lyric within the Victorian novel. The Professor and Jane Eyre house the ghost of an original verse composition, the inclusion of which allows both novels to participate together in a conversation about the novel's capacity to embody and sustain a lyric afterlife. The opening paragraphs of Shirley closely resemble her Wordsworthian preface to The Professor. From the outset, Bronte's poetry is given such a shallow burial that its forms continue to shape Shirley's generic and narrative landscape.

The Charlotte Brontes were big business upon the 1930s stage. Adaptations of the sisters' novels, particularly Charlotte's Jane Eyre, had always been popular at the box office; but from the late 1920s, there was an unprecedented biodrama boom. This chapter explores Bronte biodrama as a critically reflexive art: a notable example of popular culture in dialogue with scholarship, heritage and tourism. Following a brief survey of the public interest afforded to Bronte relics and remains during the 1920s and 1930s, two case studies are developed: Alfred Sangster's popular stage success, The Brontes and Rachel Ferguson's satirical failure, Charlotte Bronte. The provisional nature of biography and edition is highlighted by Shorter's position on Charlotte's time in Brussels and her relationship with Constantin Heger. Playwrights taking the Brontes as their subjects in the 1930s enjoyed access to more primary material than ever before: printed texts, commemorative spaces and museum objects.

This chapter seeks to reassert the presence of Charlotte Bronte in Brussels through analyses of literary tourists' accounts of their journeys to and around the Pensionnat Heger. Reading these narratives within a critical framework of literary tourism theory, the chapter aims to demonstrate how Brussels literary tourism is situated within and contributes to the Bronte legacy more broadly, particularly with regard to the parallel mythologisation of the Bronte sisters at Haworth parsonage. The chapter focuses on two themes that have emerged as the dominant issues at stake in the legacy of Bronte tourism at Haworth to date: gender and nation. While Haworth serves to reiterate Charlotte Bronte's place as an English, female writer, the chapter suggests that Brussels offers a space where an alternative narrative unfolds, one that offers possibilities for reading the crafting of female independence through cosmopolitan interactions.

This chapter explores the legacy of Jane Eyre through a consideration of reimaginings of Bertha Mason, a character presented in unequivocally negative terms in Charlotte Bronte's narrative but variously reinvented in subsequent adaptations as object of pity, femme fatale, proto-feminist figure and Gothic monster. It examines a variety of creative responses to Bronte's madwoman, in a range of mediums, including various literary genres (young adult, literary fiction, mash-up), film, television, theatre and art. Beginning with a brief survey of Bertha's afterlives, the chapter moves on to consider these representations in relation to three key aspects of her characterisation: her madness, appearance and death. The implied association between Bertha's racial identity and her madness is expressed through references to her as both 'the insane Creole' and 'the madwoman from Jamaica'.

This chapter begins with a survey of the critical fortunes of Villette: what might be characterised as its struggle to obtain autonomy as a novel, rather than as Charlotte Bronte's thinly disguised autobiography. Bronte's uncontrolled channelling of 'hunger, rebellion and rage' was considered far too instinctive, even for some of her sympathetic critics, to conform to logical, 'masculine' novelistic structural proprieties. The chapter considers the problem of transmedial adaptation for a novel that has such a distinctive vision, and that can be interpreted as, in some ways, always already an adaptation of other texts. It identifies a series of perceived or potential problems in adapting Villette's themes of surveillance and education, along with its characterisation of Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel, and its ambiguous ending. The chapter argues that the solutions that radio and theatre adapters have found can force us into a reassessment of Villette's power and distinctiveness.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the myths associated with Charlotte Bronte's life. It examines the origins of the impulse to seek 'Charlotte' in Haworth. The book examines commemorative poetry and fictional biographies to trace how the idea of the ghostly frames understandings of Charlotte Bronte's afterlife. It identifies Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, with its repeated references to folk tales and superstitions, and the uncanny qualities of the Bronte home, as stimulating the idea of Charlotte Bronte as haunted and haunting. The book explores the important cultural influence of Villette, a novel not widely read by general readers, unlike Jane Eyre. It highlights how women publishing fiction and political writing between 1910 and 1940 valued Bronte's model of a working woman offered by Lucy Snowe as they reinterpreted and reworked the oblique feminist message of Villette.