Thursday Talk: Brontës and Violence
Thursday Talks occur twice on the day: once at the Museum and once online. You can book tickets for both here.
For the in-person talk, please reserve your place below, but kindly note, you'll need to show your Museum ticket (or proof of local residency) on the door.
For the online talk, a recording will be sent out afterwards for online-talk ticket holders who missed the live event.
| Event | Time | Price | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-person | 2pm | Free with entry to the Museum and for residents in BD20, BD21 and BD22 | Brontë Space at the Old School Room |
| Online | 7:30pm | £6 | On Zoom: a link will be sent before the event |
When Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë’s novels were first published in the 1840s, they caused quite a stir. Amidst the more positive reviews, critics singled out the apparent violence of the Brontës’ literary productions as coarse and unfeminine. Violence has since become a provocative, as well as an alluring, influence on perceptions of the Brontë sisters and their major works, one that continues to shape our view of them as writers today.
In this talk, we’ll explore the depiction of violence in a selection of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë’s fiction, alongside its ongoing impact on their cultural afterlives through recent adaptations and biopics such as Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible, to reveal its shifting role in their legacies.
Dr Sophie Franklin is a researcher based in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. Her work specialises in representations of violence in nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular focus on the Brontë family. She has written widely on the Brontës, and is the author of Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century (Saraband, 2016) and the recent Violence and the Brontës: Language, Reception, Afterlives (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Sophie is also an Associate Editor of Brontë Studies.
If the event is cancelled, we’ll contact you. We reserve the right to make changes to our programme. All information is correct at the time of booking. We kindly ask that you do not bring dogs or other pets to our in-person events unless stated otherwise (if you'd like to bring your service dog to an event, please let us know).
