الفهرس 
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Abstract
This thesis studies the main three novels by the Bronte sisters, charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in order to prove that Victorian proto-feminist female writers were able to break away from their feelings of gender and intellectual inferiority as manifested in the “Anxiety of Authorship” that characterized women’s writing during the nineteenth century. It employs the feminist literary theory in order to analyze three models of subversive literary subgenres developed by the Brontes such as the “Female Gothic,” the “Male-Female Double Bildungsroman,” and the “Female Kunstlerroman” to underscore how the sisters were able to use these unconventional forms to portray the psychologically distorted female self of every Victorian woman. It also exposes how they deployed these untraditional subgenres to covertly articulate their contempt against the patriarchal system without being severely attacked by Victorian male critics and authors. This Thesis attempts to demonstrate how the Brontes perceived their society and how their literary enterprise deviated from the patriarchal literary guidelines prescribed for women writers during the nineteenth century by studying the critical-double standards that controlled the reception of literature in the Victorian era. It aims to reveal how they examined many features of masculine oppression such as women’s imprisonment in domestic households, economic and intellectual inferiority, sexual and emotional repression, marital and domestic violence, and literary and artistic suppression to underline their non-conformist role in paving the road to the first wave of the feminist movement in Victorian England. It also sheds light upon their proto-feminist agenda that aimed to reform the Victorian society by encouraging gender equality and demanding comprehensive amendments in the legislative system of Victorian England