Welcome
The Brontës and the Shelleys
*Call for Papers* for our first conference & book signing at Newstead Abbey, NG15 9HJ
SUMMER 2025
*Webinars Soon Available*
Summer 2024
Our first Conference & Book Signing
We are now collecting numbers for a book signing & conference
*Call for papers now open*
Submit proposals of 15 minute presentations:
• FAO Rachel if connected to the Shelleys
• FAO Lucy if connected to the Brontës
Let us know of your Interest & to receive further information please contact: theshelleyanbrontes@icloud.com
About The Shelleyan Brontës
Dr. J E Young.
Juliet Young’s research papers consider the influence of poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) upon the Brontë family.
This research is the first to view the sisters as readers of a wide European narrative, which inspired them through reading of the Shelleys in magazines and newspapers, to view the possibility of becoming women writers themselves.
When Juliet was 19 and doing her undergraduate dissertation she asked if it could be on Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters, but was told that the Brontës hadn‘t read Mary Shelley. So over the next several years she continued this area of research.
Research Papers…
Published papers on The Shelleyan Brontës can be read at:
J E Young, The Textual Presence of Mary Shelley's The Last Man in the Juvenila of the Bronte Siblings, Literary Imagination, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imad013
J. E. Young, Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Bront®
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9Y38KDXGSPPIPIYMSMCA/full?target=10.1080/14748932.2024.2311685
https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjw270
Young, J. E. "Perdita's Cottage: Mary Robinson in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Last Man." Notes and Queries 64, 1 (March 2017): 83-6.
Upcoming Publications…
My first academic book about the Brontë juvenilia & the sisters‘ first three novels The Shelleyan Brontë: Mary and Percy Shelley in the Work of the Brontë Family with Palgrave MacMillian is now available from July 2024, and can be purchased here at
at The Shelleyan Brontës: Mary and Percy Shelley in the Work of the Brontës | SpringerLink
To request a copy of this book for review please contact bookreviews@springer.com
Also available to buy in separate chapters:
1. A Process of Appropriation
2. The Textual Shelleys: The Brontës as Readers
3. Appropriated Print: The Brontës as Writers
4. The Juvenilia: Rereading in a Shelleyan Context
5. The Last Man: Placing a Significant Source Text
6. The Frankenstein Trio: A Romantic Writing Methodology
7. A Female Lineage
A New Perspective
A groundbreaking new perspective in Brontë scholarship
A whole new perspective on the Brontës’ writing which places the important textual presence of Mary and Percy Shelley - understanding what they wrote by assessing what they read.
The Shelleyan Brontës: The Presense of Mary & Percy Shelley in the Work of the Brontës
233 pages
This book explores the significant textual relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley and the early works of the Brontë siblings. Through a detailed examination of the Shelleyan narrative accessible to the Brontës from their childhood to their final novels, this study argues for a fresh perspective on the Brontës' engagement with the Shelleys in both their juvenilia and later seven novels. In this respect, the book considers the Brontës as readers rather than exclusively as writers, viewing them as a product of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace which maintained affinities to Romanticism. Reading, rewriting, and appropriating the textual Shelleys was a fundamental vein stemming the Brontës’ writing from childhood, with Mary epitomising the model for what the sisters would eventually become: a female novelist.