Barbara Heritage, Assistant Director & Curator of Collections, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, will give a lecture Thursday, September 15 in Butler Library room 523 at 6pm on "Brontë and the Bookmakers: The Rise and Reception of Jane Eyre."

Including her early work on the Angrian saga, Charlotte Brontë’s initial impulse was to make manuscript books that were eccentric, private affairs, but were also intertextual experiments that imitated the styles of a wide range of printed materials. Brontë was later forced to modify her writing — both in form and content — to meet the demands of the publishing marketplace.

In this talk, Heritage will argue that, in responding to these pressures, Brontë developed and employed a sometimes defensive rhetoric that, upon inspection, reveals the limitations of marketing visual, written, and printed artifacts to nineteenth-century audiences. This method of analysis informs our understanding both of Brontë’s development as an author and of the language of her first published novel, Jane Eyre.

"Brontë and the Bookmakers: The Rise and Reception of Jane Eyre"
Thursday, September 15
6pm
Butler Library, room 523

To reserve your space, please email cul-events@columbia.edu.