Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and the Mentor-Lover [Hardcover]

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront? and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.Acknowledgements Prologue: The Mentor-Lover in the Eighteenth Century: Novel, Conduct Book and Archetype Saturated with the Platonic Idea ?: Judgment and Passion in Northanger Abbey , Pride and Prejudice and Emma Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park : At Once Both a Tragedy and a Comedy Slave of a Fixed and Dominant Idea : Charlotte Bront?'s Early Writings: Preliminaries or Precursors? Should We Try to Counteract this Influence? : Jane Eyre , Shirley and Villette George Eliot and The Clerical Sex : From Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch Worth Nine-Tenths of the Sermons ? The Author as Mentor-Lover in Daniel Deronda Epilogue: The Author, the Reader and the imaged solution Notes Bibliography IndexPATRICIA MENON has taught English at Niagara College and at Brock University, Ontario, Canada.