Building the Brontës: Rationale,Problems and Solutions for a Scholarly Hypertext

The Brontës: A Hypertext Edition is a work in progress, an attempt to provide students and scholars with cross-referenced editions, annotations, nineteenth-century critical accounts, and contextual links to the sources for the 1100-odd quotations and allusions within the novels. Bringing together over 100MB of texts and illustrations, the hypertext is designed to be a scholarly critical edition, stressing the interdependence of literary works, noting textual variations, and thoroughly documenting the genesis and foundations of Brontë criticism. Using the Brontë hypertext as an illustration, this article makes note of a few limitations in print editions that a hypertext edition might readily address. In the article's deliberations over theoretical concerns which must accompany a large-scale electronic edition, the need for a range of tagging options is stressed, the limitations of HTML are noted, and alternate hypertext systems are examined.