Throughout her career, novelist Charlotte Brontë drew on the Book of Esther

(JNS) — The 19th-century English novelist Charlotte Brontë is best known for her 1847 novel “Jane Eyre,” which is a staple of many U.S. middle and high school curricula. A new journal article addresses a different side of the Victorian writer—her focus throughout her career on Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story.

Brontë had “a prolonged intertextual relationship with the ‘Book of Esther’” throughout her career, reaching a peak in her 1853 novel Villette, Channah Damatov, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, wrote on March 15 in “The Journal of the Brontë Soci...