The Brontë Sisters: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey & more

Three sisters. One parsonage. A literary revolution that reshaped fiction forever.

From the windswept moorlands of Wuthering Heights to the fierce moral independence of Jane Eyre, and bold, ahead-of-its-time realism of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, this talk explores how Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë transformed personal experience into groundbreaking literature.

Drawing on their letters and lives in Haworth, uncover the radical ideas about gender, class, morality and artistic ambition that challenged Victorian expectations – and still resonate today.

Doors open at 4:30pm, talk starts at 5pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specialises in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focusing on the gothic and the supernatural. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has spoken at Hay Festival and from the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph, Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

This talk is 16+

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