ABSTRACT
This talk opens up the question of fictionality through the shared matrix around two very different 1858 texts: a biography of Charlotte Brontë that circulated as a true story of Jane Eyre and an autobiography of Josiah Henson that circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.”
In 1858, when the life of Josiah Henson, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life, was being promoted as a kind of corrective to Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reviewers of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) were widely reading the biography as a narrative key to Jane Eyre. The stakes of both texts could not have been more different: Henson’s life spoke to a direct experience of enslavement and his perspective as a Christian leader, while Gaskell’s biography spoke to Brontë’s roles as a woman and author—and the question of who might be the original of Mr. Rochester.
Despite the stark contrast in the political stakes of these texts, both books reveal how the figure of the author emerges through disparate but related genres. Texts–whether nonfiction or fiction–that purport to share an historical source can create a kind of mutual heightening between those textual representations and the figure of the author that unites them. Henson’s identification with Uncle Tom makes one element of this “mutual heightening” obvious: His fame was animated not only by Stowe’s claim that he was the source of the novel, but by the broader cultural narratives about race and Christianity that gave that novel currency.
BIO:
Sarah Allison is Associate Professor of English and Hutchinson Distinguished Professor at Loyola University New Orleans and an affiliate of the Uppsala Computational Literary Studies Group (UCOL). Her scholarship integrates computational methods of textual analysis with critical literary inquiry into nineteenth-century Anglo-American novels, poetry, and non-fiction. As a member of the Stanford Literary Lab, she co-authored several of the studies in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017). She is the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018). This talk is drawn from her forthcoming book, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery, which is in production with Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in ELH, Genre, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Victorian Poetry, Public Books, and Avidly, and her co-authored essay with Karl Berglund, a computational perspective on the English translations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, appeared in the January 2024 issue of PMLA.