Week 6: Publishers, Manuscripts, and Infinite Spreadsheets

This week, I finally got started on my research paper. As I’m working my way through the Gaskell novels, I’m organizing my notes to start to build conclusions for my paper, and to better guide my reading. Throughout Charlotte Bronte’s novels, there’s a clear trajectory: starting with The Professor, her earliest and least feminist novel by a considerable margin, and ending with the role-defying female protagonists such as Lucy Snowe. And yet, the shift in ideology is obviously far from linear, in part due to the influences of publishers, editors, readership markets, and how much freedom and authority Bronte had to write as she wanted to. In reading through Bronte’s body of work, Jane Eyre, despite being her most beloved and recognizable work, sticks out from the others both in terms of the strength of radical messaging and sensational nature of the plot. In many ways, despite defining her legacy, it is the least characteristically “Charlotte Bronte” novel of the bunch. This is largely due to her publisher’s desire for more drama and intensity, as opposed to the quiet, less eventful interior lives Bronte was more drawn to write both in her first novel, and later on once the success of Jane Eyre allowed her a bit more flexibility to write as she wanted. The role of external factors, such as the influence of publishers, editors, and marketability, wasn’t something I initially thought to consider in my research question. But now, as I’m making my way through Gaskell’s canon, I’ve been taking into account more variables, such as publisher influence, which I hadn’t been considering in my analysis. I’ve been reading through correspondants with publishers and editors, and have ordered through interlibrary loan restored manuscript versions, so that I can take into account the full process that a novel goes through before reaching its final stages.

On the internship side, this week has been fairly run-of-the-mill. I’ve continued working on my article for the National Poetry Month, as well as working on researching schools for a bunch of different projects the Academic Affairs department is working on. It’s an infinite amount of spreadsheets, but it’s great fun! Who would’ve thought prowling the internet for university self-evaluation data would be entertaining for me, but here we are.