Dr Lucy Hanks

The University of Manchester, English and American Studies, Graduate Student

University of Birmingham, School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies, Undergraduate

University of Oxford, English, Graduate Student

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My research explores how mid-Victorian women writers self-edited their manuscripts for publication. I analyse markings, crossings-out, substitutions and excisions on the manuscripts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Working across multiple genres (poetry, prose and life-writing) has led me to identity a pattern of self-reflexivity in female writing of this period that produces meaning through multiplicity and duality. For example, while a line of poetry may seem to convey a message that conforms to a normative discourse of female behaviour, revision may expose how a line holds multiple scansions or a word has been intentionally chosen for its double meaning, which can provide a more subversive reading. Thus, I argue that deletions and excisions, which could be read as instances of self-censorship, in fact demonstrate how women negotiated their expression to experiment with female representation in different ways.
Supervisors: Dr Clara Dawson and Dr Michael Sanders

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Joseph Carroll

University of Missouri - St. Louis

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Dan Hicks

University of Oxford

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

M. A. Katritzky

The Open University

Rob S E A N Wilson

University of California, Santa Cruz

Stephen Whittle

Manchester Metropolitan University

Bob Nicholson

Edge Hill University

Manfred Malzahn

United Arab Emirates University

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Papers by Dr Lucy Hanks

Multiple voices on the manuscript of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Read it through my marks': Revision and Female Authorship in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century

This thesis analyses the way that women prepared their manuscripts for publication in the mid-nin... more This thesis analyses the way that women prepared their manuscripts for publication in the mid-nineteenth-century to understand the prescriptions on gender that influenced the development of their texts. It considers markings, deletions, and cuts to contribute to 'manuscript textuality' which informs an interpretation of self-reflexive images within the text. The project argues that women embrace self-reflexivity as a means to engage in an active negotiation of gendered discourses in the nineteenth-century marketplace. By analysing the ways in which texts are edited with a view to reception, this methodology opens up new opportunities for interpreting the gendered dimensions to transformations of form. Revision often allows women to mitigate the impact of their language, while refining self-reflexivity in the text hints at something potentially transgressive which has been taken out. Chapter one analyses how the collaborative way that Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë is revised engages with clear social imperatives involved with life writing. Collaboration allows Gaskell to shift the narrative voice between ambiguity and authority in order to manage the distance between the author and subject. Chapter two then turns to Charlotte Brontë's cuttings on the manuscript of Villette to understand how her representation of an unconventional female subject is influenced by an awareness of the text's reception. Excisions reveal how Brontë embraces silence as a productive narrative mode for her protagonist, which enables her to maintain control over the way she is represented and received by Victorian society. Chapter three examines Elizabeth Barrett Browning's revisions of Aurora Leigh, which allow her to refine her challenge to poetic traditions in the mid-nineteenth-century by embedding it within the very rhythm and sounds of her lines. Attending to the manuscript not only provides new perspectives on well-trodden material; it allows us to understand how women were not silenced by gender prescriptions in the mid-nineteenth-century but actively negotiated them through the act of revision. These studies, among others, indicate the extent to which the physicality of a text, and its medium, can influence meaning. Barbara Heritage's bibliographical 23 study of Jane Eyre explains how the Victorian publishing marketplace impacts 'both the format and narration of Brontë's writing'. She explores Brontë's 24 distinction between the physical book as a commodity and its intangible literary content to suggest that Jane Eyre was a 'compromise' between the 'demands of the British marketplace for fiction' and her authorial integrity. She demonstrates how Brontë manipulates the structure of the novel to embrace the practicalities of the publishing industry (such as the conventional three volumes) but also comment on her own textuality; thus Jane Eyre 'defends itself from the potboiler fiction of its time'. Heritage therefore demonstrates the rewards of 25 'synthesiz[ing] bibliography with formalist literary criticism'. Her essay is 26 useful in showing how contemporary readers 'misread Brontë as merely massmarket romance' but also highlights how bibliographical study often excludes the physical status of the manuscript. Rather surprisingly, up to now the interactive 27 relationship between authorial expression, literary manuscripts and interpretation of the text has been underplayed within the study of material culture, bibliography and textual criticism. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders have argued that the digital age has transformed our 23 understanding of the relationships between texts and material culture. For example, the digital archive -which makes manuscripts and other unpublished materials relatively accessibleexposes 'precisely how texts get mediated' (p. 1). Not only this but reading on screens has made readers confront that 'the meaning of words are interdependent with the graphic elements in which they are embodied, surrounded, and displayed.' (p. 2) Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.

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Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

Journal of Victorian Culture

This article presents an alternative reading of Lucy Snowe’s silences in Charlotte Brontë’s Ville... more This article presents an alternative reading of Lucy Snowe’s silences in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Instead of interpreting silence as submission or antagonistic ‘evasions’, I suggest that it operates as a productive mode. This is emphasized by Brontë’s markings and excisions on the fair copy manuscript. Revisions render parts of the text intentionally ambiguous; I provide extended close readings of the manuscript that demonstrate how Lucy Snowe makes the fact that she has withheld something explicit to the reader. Villette draws attention to its own composition and reception to such an extent that it is the very act of non-narration – and the way it engages the reader – that produces meaning. Approaching this through the lens of the romance plot addresses some of the overtly unnarratable aspects of female selfhood in the mid-nineteenth century. As a female autobiographer, Lucy Snowe makes her struggle to express her sexuality explicit. Brontë crafts this self-reflexivity to form ...

Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

Journal of Victorian Culture

Multiple voices on the manuscript of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Read it through my marks': Revision and Female Authorship in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century

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Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

Journal of Victorian Culture

Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

Journal of Victorian Culture

Dr Lucy Hanks

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