A Process of Appropriation

This chapter discusses both old and new scholarship on the relationship between the Shelleys and the Brontës, which serves as the point of departure for my own research. I define the juvenilia as a playful game or process of appropriation which borrows from source texts. The four different formats of borrowing—quotation or citation, imitation of structure or pastiche, thematic, and linguistic similarity—by which the Brontës might make use of source text material are discussed and will later establish how I recognise the work of the four siblings may have responded to or engaged with a Shelleyan text.