This thesis investigates from narratological and historical perspectives how illness paradoxically enriches the narratives of the Brontë sisters and how the three writers actively and creatively employed illness as a source of their literary imagination despite their forced passivity in the face of real illness experience. The first part of this thesis focuses on illness and explores it in three directions: literary style, plot, and narrative. Chapter 1 shows how illness can be represented in two opposing tones, those of the romantic and the real and traces the process of the evolution of Charlotte Brontë’s literary style from free romanticism into self-conscious realism. Chapter 2 first analyses how, as the major ‘narrative desire’, illness initiates, develops and ends the plot of the Brontës’ seven published novels and then considers the ‘reportability’ of illness-related events. Chapter 3 takes up the old question as to whether Nelly Dean of Wuthering Heights is a reliable narrator and contends that, as long as illness is perceived ambiguously, one can produce endless arbitrary interpretations of those who narrate illness-related events. The second part of this thesis deals with one of the dominant themes of the Brontës’ illness narratives: nursing. Chapter 4 considers the context of the Brontë sickroom scenes and looks at how the contemporary extensive notion of nursing is related to mothering. Assuming that mothering, or nursing by a maternal figure, is what the Brontë protagonists lack and seek for in the development of the plots, the following four chapters examine variations on the quest for the mother in Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
