Introduction: Charlotte Brontë and Contagion

This introductory chapter sets out the argument that Charlotte Brontë was a writer aware of, interested in, and often anxious about, contagion. It establishes the claims that will run through the rest of the book: that the transmission of the diseases Brontë describes in her novels is a significant, and under-explored, aspect of those representations; that contagion as a concept in the 1840s and 1850s was a broad concept which encompassed many kinds of infection; that attending to Brontë’s depictions of contagion and infection offers potential more fully to understand her analysis and diagnosis of many other aspects of human interaction and society. The chapter offers context for contagion and its implications both metaphorical and literal in the period, and outlines Brontë’s particular sense of what health and its preservation entailed in the context of the epidemic and contagious diseases prevalent in her lifetime.