Jane Eyre's American Daughters: From the Wide, Wide World to Anne of Green Gables, A Study of Marginalized Maidens
by John D. Seelye
This book is about the influence of Charlotte Brontë's romance on North American writers, including Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Douglas Wiggin. Though novels like Little Women bear little resemblance to Brontë's sensational narrative, John Seelye demonstrates that the influence of Brontë's Gothic romance in America was filtered through Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of the author, published shortly after Charlotte's death in 1855. A sentimental classic that resulted in "the Brontë Myth," Gaskell's book promoted an image of Charlotte as a long-suffering creative genius of high moral standards, resembling the heroine of a domestic novel. The result in America was a series of realistic narratives that eliminated the sensational element of Jane Eyre while retaining the situation of an older, mentoring male presence who eventually marries the heroine. Aimed at younger, primarily female readers, these novels recommended themselves to older persons as well, a mature audience that Seelye hopes to lure back to books he regards as American classics of a unique kind, bearing the clear impress of the Brontëan profile but with defining trans-Atlantic changes. John Seelye is a Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida.
