Yes, the Brontës weren’t concealing their ‘gender’, they were concealing their sex, and Charlotte says somewhere, maybe in her introduction to the reissued Wuthering Heights, that they deliberately choose names that seemed vaguely masculine but weren’t incontrovertibly male like Charles, Algernon and Edward would have been. And scholarly work done on the reception and reviews of Wuthering Heights when it was thought to be by a man versus when it was known to be by a woman shows striking differences.
I will look up the article by Shim on queerness in Villette, but worth pointing out the author is still a doctoral student; many of us would look back at stuff we published then and think ‘Okayyy…’
Probably unfair without reading the essay, but Lucy retains her female dress, just adding a hat, jacket and combing back her front hair to make her readable as ‘meant to be playing a man in a girls’ school play’, because she’s worried about the proprieties, as a friendless foreign teacher not long promoted from nursery governess, not out of some kind of relish in playing with boundaries.
And she finds she enjoys acting, but because the role allows her temporary access to a freedom she otherwise hadn’t got access to, even as a first person narrator (she’s famously reticent, and conceals key facts from the reader, like why she’s alone in the world, who Dr John is, what happens to Paul Emanuel) — it’s like Jane Eyre’s drawings.