Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 1-29

3. Jane Austen’s Byronic Heroes I: Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 30-60

4. Jane Austen’s Byronic Heroes II: Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 61-92

5. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Byronic Heroes: Wives and Daughters and North and South

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 93-123

6. George Eliot’s Byronic Heroes I: Early Works and Poetry

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 124-152

7. George Eliot’s Byronic Heroes II: Later Works

   • Sarah Wootton

   Pages 153-182

8. Back Matter

   Pages 183-253

   PDF

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

• Byron
• Byronic
• Byronism
• heroes
• hero
• heroism
• masculinity
• nineteenth century
• Romantic
• Victorian
• women's writing
• women writers
• Jane Austen
• Elizabeth Gaskell
• George Eliot
• period drama
• poetry
• Romanticism
• Victorian era
• women

“One of the hallmarks of this wide ranging and erudite book is the literary authority Wootton brings to the endeavor. She makes a glancing mention of Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) … for example, but does so with concision, thereby providing the reader with an overview of themes in nineteenth-century literature. … Wootton shows how women novelists rejected the ‘vulgar Byronic personality’ while adopting his ‘narrative agility and robust ideas,’ as they experimented with genre and form.” (Jonathan Gross, European Romantic Review, Vol. 29 (04), 2018)


“Wootton provides both substantive and nuanced analysis of the literary and film/television texts chosen for the book, and the absence of certain texts may besimply a matter of space. … Throughout each section of the book, Wootton is strongly engaged with critics of Romantic and Victorian literature as well as film critics and reviewers who tracked the popularity of the various adaptations. Studies of literary influence can sometimes feel forced, but that is not the case here.” (Cheryl A. Wilson, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 37 (1), 2018)



“This is an informative monograph which prompts a re-thinking of Byron’s ambivalent legacies. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Wootton’s study will be valuable to any scholars, students, or general readers interested in both the Romantic and the Victorian age as well as in the Byron phenomenon more broadly, and in twenty-first century media and film studies. … the book takes on a subject that we thought we knew all about and discovers something fresh to say about it.” (Carmen Casaliggi, Byron Journal, Vol. 45 (1), 2017) 

Winner of the 2016 Elma Dangerfield Prize
“The book is an outstanding contribution to scholarship on Byron’s reception and impact, as well as more broadly on the interrelationship between Romanticism and Victorian realism … . Uncovering yet more ways in which women writers responded to Byron’s work and persona, it ultimately asks us to rethink the figure of the Byronic Hero. Wootton’s book stands out for the originality of its research, the grace and clarity of the prose, and the persuasive logic of the exposition. It will be useful to the broadest range of Byron scholars, as well as for scholars working in Austen studies, Victorian studies, and studies of film adaptations from literature, among others.” (Prize Committee of the International Association of Byron Societies)

“A very welcome addition to nineteenth-century scholarship - cogently argued, nicely written, thoroughly researched. I enjoyed reading it immensely.” (Ghislaine McDayter, Professor of English, BucknellUniversity, USA)

• Durham University, UK

  Sarah Wootton

Sarah Wootton is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on the afterlives of Romantic poets and Victorian women writers. She is the author of Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (2006).

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