We Are Three Sisters: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontes

In "We Are Three Sisters," Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontës' fiction of personal development, exploring the ways in which it recognizes the family as a defining community for selfhood.

Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontës' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology disseminated in conduct books and home guides that held the family to be the original nurturer of subjectivity. Arguing that the sisters share a common interest in the familial influences on self-development and self-understanding, Lamonica draws connections among their works to prove this argument.