‘That indefinable something’: Charlotte Brontë and Protest

This chapter argues that Virginia Woolf’s depiction of Charlotte Brontë weaponizes her life against her artistic achievements. Although Woolf’s early reviews convey a palpable fascination with Brontë’s strength of character, Brontë quickly becomes a symbol of the inherently flawed Victorian women writer. Drawing on Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë to justify her portrait of a writer in social and cultural isolation, Woolf perpetuates Victorian tropes of unfeminine passion found in Leslie Stephen’s literary criticism. Woolf’s lasting legacy is the condemnation of the artistic damage of Brontë’s anger in A Room of One’s Own: this chapter therefore demonstrates that Woolf’s feminist aims often operate at the expense of individual writers.