A visit to the Brontë parsonage: metamorphoses of Charlotte Brontë in Michèle Roberts’ the mistressclass

In “Haworth, November, 1904” (1904), Virginia Woolf maintains a literary pilgrimage “is legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters .” A hundred years later, Michèle Roberts, a British writer whose work has been inspired by the Brontë sisters and Woolf, pays homage to them in The Mistressclass (2003), a novel that reinvents the parsonage at Haworth in 1855 to resurrect Charlotte Brontë. This novel is the focus of this chapter that investigates Roberts’s metamorphosis of the Victorian writer. It studies how Roberts reclaims the unreliability of auto/biographical writing and affirms the alternative, diverse, multiple visions of the past fiction provides. In The Mistressclass, I suggest, Roberts conceives a literary class that unravels the conflicting dichotomy between a woman’s imaginative power and her domestic life by granting Charlotte Brontë the same power of vision her heroines Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe possess. Following in Woolf’s steps, I argue, Roberts imagines a literary, textual pilgrimage to reinvent the Brontë parsonage as a space of female self-realisation. In The Mistressclass, the Victorian past and the present day coexist so that both protagonists, Charlotte and Vinny, have their vision