Biofiction and the Neo-Victorian Crime Novel: The Case of the Brontës

Neo-Victorian biofiction self-reflexively appropriates the Victorian past, transforming it freely into a story fitting the current cultural milieu. Despite its essentially fictitious nature, biofiction makes claims to authenticity, drawing in its audiences with suggestions that the sensationalised versions of the famous lives are the “true” ones, and often resists the existing grand narratives of Victorian personages that had been disseminated throughout most of the twentieth century. In the context of the myth of Charlotte Brontë as a model of Victorian femininity and authorship that Brontë herself perpetuated the issue of biofictions’ authenticity and its implications for our relationship with the past is further complicated by the myth-making process of biomythography. This chapter analyses the negotiations of authenticity, sensationalism, and presentism in a corpus of contemporary literary biofictions that adapt the life and writing of Charlotte Brontë into a sensational and detective convention. They position Charlotte Brontë as a stock character in crime fiction, either as a criminal (James Tully’s The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, 1999) or a detective (e.g. Laura Joh Rowland’s The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë, 2008 and Bedlam, 2010, or Bella Ellis’ The Brontë Mystery series, 2019–21). These adaptive novels attempt to do away with the Brontë myth, which is then subverted to offer a new, more scandalous neo-Victorian version of the author and her life.