Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and the Mentor-Lover

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.

Autorentext
PATRICIA MENON has taught English at Niagara College and at Brock University, Ontario, Canada.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Prologue: The Mentor-Lover in the Eighteenth Century: Novel, Conduct Book and Archetype "Saturated with the Platonic Idea"?: Judgment and Passion in Northanger Abbey , Pride and Prejudice and Emma Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park : "At Once Both a Tragedy and a Comedy" "Slave of a Fixed and Dominant Idea": Charlotte Brontë's Early Writings: Preliminaries or Precursors? "Should We Try to Counteract this Influence?": Jane Eyre , Shirley and Villette George Eliot and "The Clerical Sex": From Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch "Worth Nine-Tenths of the Sermons"? The Author as Mentor-Lover in Daniel Deronda Epilogue: The Author, the Reader and the "imaged solution" Notes Bibliography Index