The Juvenilia: Rereading in a Shelleyan Context

Having defined the appropriative writing practice of the Brontë siblings in their juvenilia—a process of borrowing from a source work to write a new text—alongside the available presence of the textual Shelleys in their reading material, I now propose to use this framework to place the textual Shelleys. Building on the recognitions of Shelleyan influence by critics such as Winnifrith and Chitham, I identify notable linguistic, structural and thematic borrowings from the Shelleyan print narrative within their juvenilia. I propose from the early 1830s the changes in the Brontës’ juvenilia demonstrate a new engagement with Shelleyan narratives.