The close friendship between Charlotte Bronte and Mary Taylor began
in boarding school and lasted for the rest of their lives. It was
Mary Taylor, in fact, who inspired Bronte to leave her oppressive
parsonage home and go to Brussels, the eventual setting for her
novel, Villette. Mary herself led a much less restricted life,
especially in her later years as a feminist essayist who strongly
urged women to consider their "first duty" to be working to support
themselves.
In Miss Miles, her only novel, Taylor breaks with tradition by
creating a profoundly feminist and morally intense work which
depicts women's friendships as sustaining life and sanity through
all of the vicissitudes of Victorian womanhood. She also introduces
an innovative narrative form which Janet Murray (who has written an
introduction for this edition) calls a "feminist bildungsroman":
the story of the education of several heroines which emphasizes
their friendship and economic and mental well-being rather than
their love lives. Set in the small Yorkshire village of Repton
against the backdrop of starvation in the wool districts and the
rise of Chartism in the 1830s, this recovered feminist classic
chronicles the lives of four disparate and individually ambitious
women as they learn to find their own voices and support one
another. The novel's emphasis on the healing power of women's
friendships echoes the relationship between Bronte and Taylor
herself. Originally published in 1890, Miss Miles has been
unavailable for decades. Its reappearance will delight all lovers
of fine literature.
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