The Brontë sisters and the Christian Remembrancer: a pilot study in the use of the 'Burrows Method' to identify the authorship of unsigned articles in the nineteenth-century periodical press

In this article we report on the results of testing a hypothesis built on an attribution which, when the external evidence for it is examined, has proved rather shaky. Most Brontë scholars are familiar with the fact that the Christian Remembrancer carried four reviews of various publications by or concerning the three sisters. In 1975, for example, Miriam Allott printed extracts from an 1848 review of Jane Eyre, a review of Villette published in 1853, and an 1857 review of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë in her book The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, while in 2002 Susan Bauman reprinted a discussion of the Brontë sisters” poetry in an 1851 article called “Minor poets. One of these articles, the 1853 review of Villette, is fairly generally attributed by scholars to the literary journalist Anne Mozley, while the others are accepted as unidentified. It seemed to us that the continuing significance of the Brontë sisters” work, combined with the growing academic interest in the role of female journalists, including Anne Mozley, made investigating the authorship of these articles a suitable case for testing the efficacy of the “Burrows method” in the new area of unsigned nineteenth-century periodical articles. We decided, therefore, to investigate not just whether the review of Villette was written by Anne Mozley, but whether she was responsible for any or all of the other three articles. We believe that our analysis has established a strong statistical likelihood that she was the author of the reviews of Villette and the Life of Charlotte Brontë and that she probably also wrote “Minor poets,” but that she did not write the review of Jane Eyre.