This reading list is an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2023. We have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of resources by consulting the MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, and the Brontë Blog (http://bronteblog.blogspot.com). Book chapters and scholarly articles on the Brontës are included except those articles published in Brontë Studies. Entire books on the Brontës are in the reviews section of this journal. The author’s initials in brackets are provided after each annotation.

Emily Brontë has proven a perpetual mystery to readers, critics and biographers, who have struggled to account for the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights since its publication in 1847. Brontë’s intense need for privacy and her limited relationships with people outside her family have also proven tantalising for writers of biofiction: she is the ideal subject because there is plenty of space to speculate about her interior life and how it might have informed her art. Twenty-first-century biofictions create a distinctly contemporary vision of Emily Brontë inflected by shifting understandings of authorship. These novels are significant not only for what they reveal about her afterlife but also for the way they function as interpretations of Wuthering Heights, given their preoccupation with attempting to find an ‘answer’ for how and why she came to write that novel.

Despite their humble origins, the Brontës’ ‘little books’ have achieved an iconic status and now command astronomical sums. This article describes how one such manuscript, the September 1830 issue of the ‘Second Series of the Young Men’s Magazine’, provides new evidence for long patterns of recycling in the works of the Brontës. Starting with an examination of the physical materials salvaged for Charlotte Brontë’s miniature book, this study discusses another form of creative reuse: the interpolation of lines from Wordsworth’s ‘A Night-Piece’ in the story ‘A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’. Charlotte and her sister Anne continued to draw on ‘A Night-Piece’ in Shirley (1849) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Even as Wordsworth’s poem invests their writings with cultural capital, more intangible values become apparent, notably an ethics of care for nature and others that stands in contrast to harmful, extractive practices. Charlotte’s propensity for creative salvage illuminates a greater purpose at work in her writing: a desire to preserve a literary and environmental landscape both under threat.

Charlotte Brontë’s poem ‘The Midnight Song’ appears in the second issue of the second series of the ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. This Little Book, created in miniature to be a fitting object for the toy soldiers that inspired the siblings’ collaborative storytelling, was acquired by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2019. This article enjoys the privilege of being the first to offer a critical account of ‘The Midnight Song’ to celebrate its first publication. It considers Charlotte’s delineation of the exile, expatriate and dreamer, figures who represent different but related ways of knowing and perceiving the world. As the poem unfolds, Charlotte inhabits these subject positions simultaneously, identifying their privileges and testing their limits. In so doing, she hones her understanding of the writer’s craft and creative power, revealing at just fourteen years of age a remarkable self-assurance when wielding her pen. In turn, the poem proves prophetic, for here Charlotte plays with the tropes of un/belonging, dis/connection and mis/communication that recur throughout her oeuvre.

Few literary works are as strongly associated with nature as Wuthering Heights (1847). This article explores the representation of nature in Emily Brontë’s novel as embedded in the narrators’ discourse. It contends that the two main narrators, Nelly Dean and Lockwood, enact a process of narrative reinscription that appeases the perceived threat of events. This process entails Catherine and Heathcliff being turned into figurative language so as to be ‘spoken’ and tamed. On the basis that stories equate layers of protection, Nelly Dean and Lockwood reinscribe the landscape symbolically, re-reading those signs whose referent needs to be made palatable. The said signs point to a source of excess in Catherine, Heathcliff and the moors. This paper follows John Hillis Miller, Carol Jacobs and Margaret Homans in the exploration of narrative gaps and patterns, yet it delves deeper into the literary function of nature as a medium to rewrite and domesticate the semiotic geography of Wuthering Heights, and not as mere landscape, however representative of the novel it can be.