“But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!”

April 18, 2016 12:48 PM

On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, writers and artists reflect on her greatest creation. [The Guardian]

Sarah Waters:

I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. “Do you think,” she asks him, “because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter.

Tessa Hadley:

Jane Eyre is so built into the shape of my imagination that I can hardly think about it critically; I’m always in among its trees – the sturdy, northern, low-growing hawthorn and hazel bushes of its terrain – and can’t dispassionately estimate the size of the wood. The novel touches not one responsive note in me, but a whole sequence of them, each quite distinct. There’s the little girl Jane, reading and dreaming in her window seat behind the drawn curtain, looking through the glass at the dreary November afternoon outside. There’s Jane the governess at Thornfield, knowing she ought to be grateful because she is employed and fed and sheltered, yet still divinely discontented.“Anybody may blame me who likes … I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit.” There’s Jane after she has inherited her fortune, joyously and fervidly domestic, cleaning down Moor House from chamber to cellar, getting ready for Christmas. And then there’s the dreamlike reconciliation with Rochester at the end of the novel, dark with the “small, penetrating rain” of overgrown Ferndean.

Jeanette Winterson:

We didn’t have books at home except for the Bible and books about the Bible. But Mrs Winterson, my mother, must have been well read at one time because she decided to read Jane Eyre to me when I was seven. Jane Eyre was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it, St John Rivers, who is keen on missionary work. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and poor Mr Rochester goes blind, but Jane doesn’t bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to the mission field. My mother read out loud, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Brontë. Only years later, reading it for myself, did I discover what she had done. It was an invaluable lesson for a writer; no story is the final one.

Margaret Drabble:

remember being gripped by two aspects when I first read Jane Eyre at the age of 10 or 11 – the horrible school at Lowood and the mad woman in the attic. The Lowood episode is the most frightening boarding school story ever written, and, of course, all children, me included, think they are friendless, persecuted and despised, and identify with the poor orphan. The meals of burned porridge were nearly as bad as the processed peas and gristle stew of Sheffield girls’ high. I don’t know why the fate of Bertha Mason simultaneously attracted and terrified me so much, but it did.

Andrew Motion:

I knew about Jane Eyre for a long time before I read it. Handsome Mr Rochester with his gothic dash and flair, plain Jane with her habit of lurking in window seats; it was an archetype of one kind of love affair, and in its way more sympathetic than the more glamorous coupling of Heathcliff and Cathy. More sympathetic because more encouraging to an adolescent (regardless of their gender) with low self-esteem. Then there was the mad woman in the attic. Didn’t all homes have such a creature – even when there was no attic and no lunatic – in the sense that the attic was a head space as well as a room space, in which invisible injustices and wildness were stored, ready to burst into the world and create havoc at any moment?

Helen Dunmore:

Jane Eyre is between two worlds and belongs in neither, although she will have to live in both during the course of the novel. She will be a beggar-maid, exposed on the moors, and a princess wooed by the King of Thornfield Hall, Mr Rochester. Neither will satisfy her. Jane’s quest is long and solitary, and she is protected only by her fiery spirit and incisive intelligence. But if Jane Eyre has fairytale and mythic qualities, she is also an intensely political creation. Jane genuinely does not believe that morality has anything to do with wealth, power or social standing. She repudiates the idea that women’s mental capacities are less than those of men. She would rather live alone than accept a relationship that compromises her independence. Strong stuff even in our times, but revolutionary in 1847. At 10 years old she castigates rich, powerful Mrs Reed for her hypocrisy and cruelty. At 18 she sets out into the world to support herself, having done everything possible to secure an education.

____

- Why Those Subversive Brontë Sisters Still Hypnotise Us by Sarah Hughes [The Guardian]

“I think a lot of it is that we’re fascinated by the idea that these three women living in a cold, cramped house in Yorkshire wrote these extraordinary novels about the most intense human experiences,” says author and playwright Samantha Ellis, whose book, Take Courage, about Anne Brontë, will be published early next year. “There’s something very appealing about the idea that they pushed back against the limits of their world. There are lots of neater, better planned books, but the Brontë novels work because they’re open-ended. We don’t know what Anne, Emily and Charlotte really wanted us to think and that means we take away something new each time.

- Charlotte Brontë: National Treasure for 200 Years by Tracy Chevalier [The Guardian]

I have long been drawn to Charlotte Brontë, and in particular to her most famous heroine, the “poor, obscure, plain and little” governess Jane Eyre. As a writer myself, I admire Jane’s surprisingly strong voice. Written in the first person – unusual enough at the time, especially for a woman writer – Jane Eyre pulls me in and keeps me at her side in a way that David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations, don’t quite manage, though they too tell their own stories. Self-possessed and fierce when she needs to be, Jane is the voice of the disenfranchised, speaking out while maintaining her dignity and ultimately triumphing. It was only on rereading Jane Eyre last year that I recognised something of my own heroine Griet in Girl With a Pearl Earring; she too comes from nothing and quietly stands her ground. This is a common enough trope in writing now, but it was groundbreaking when Jane Eyre was published to instant acclaim in 1847

- Mrs Gaskell's Biography of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell [The Guardian]

When mere children, as soon as they could read and write, Charlotte [Currer Bell] and her brother and sisters used to invent and act little plays of their own, in which the Duke of Wellington, my daughter Charlotte’s hero, was sure to come off conqueror; when a dispute would not unfrequently arise amongst them regarding the comparative merits of him, Bonaparte, Hannibal, and Caesar. I frequently thought that I had discovered signs of rising talent, which I had seldom or never seen in any of their age. A circumstance now occurs to my mind which I may as well mention. When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask.

I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered “Age and experience.” I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell), what I had best do with her brother Bramwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, “Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.” I asked Bramwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of men and women; he answered, “By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.” I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, “The Bible.” And what was the next best; she answered, “The book of nature.” I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, “That which would make her rule her house well.” Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, “By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.”

- 11 Things You Never Knew About Charlotte Bronte by Charlotte Ahlin [Bustle]

1. There was a real life “mad woman in the attic.”
2. Jane Eyre was published under a male pseudonym.
3. The harsh boarding school in Jane Eyre was based on her real boarding school.
4. ...and the character Helen was based on her own sisters.
5. Three different men wanted to marry her.
6. Her first paychecks from Jane Eyre went to the dentist.
7. She prevented her sisters books from being published.
8. She died of morning sickness.
9. Love triangles followed her around.
10. Charlotte wanted to be a painter.
11. She and her siblings started writing as children.

- Jane Eyre and the Invention of the Self by Karen Swallow Prior [The Atlantic]

The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of the older epics and romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The rise of the literary form was made possible by the technology of the printing press, the print culture that followed, and the widening literacy that was cultivated for centuries until Jane Eyre’s publication. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell Brontë’s first-person narrative of a destitute orphan girl searching for a secure identity—first among an unloving family, then an austere charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.

- Which Brontë Sibling Are You? by Charlotte Runcie [The Telegraph]

All four of the Brontës (well, except for Branwell, the often-forgotten brother) are noted for their enduring contributions to English literature, and between them they produced classic novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall among others. But if you were lucky enough to have been born into this family of literary superstars, where would you fit? Would you be remembered forever as a literary genius, or die tragically young without fulfilling your true potential?

- A Power Beyond Beauty: What do appearances mean in Jane Eyre? by Katy Waldman [Slate]

Jane Eyre, which crackles with fantasy elements like a pond with ice, deepens its quality of myth or dream by making physical appearances predictive. But what do they predict? There is plain Jane and craggy Rochester; glamorous Blanche Ingram and statuesque St. John Rivers. Charlotte Brontë’s focus on looks is more than spare fabric borrowed from the fairytale genre. It also reflects Victorian England’s preoccupation with the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy. By 1847, the year Jane Eyre came out, many respectable Londoners had embraced the idea that one’s inner traits were legible in the slope of one’s nose or the curve of one’s brow. Yet Brontë also witnessed (and half-belonged to) a movement in literature that aimed to “instruct and delight” readers with clear, luminous representations of virtuous behavior. Like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, she wrote fiction that idealized the faculty of penetration: sympathetic insight into someone’s true nature. Brontë and her near-contemporaries wrote about the need to subordinate outside to inside; to snatch away the veils of class, prejudice, and superficial appearance. Establishing a distinction between characters’ external and internal selves, these authors were the first to identify interiority as the novel’s central concern.

- Brontë’s Revolution by Claire Harman [Financial Times] [Paywall]

No one would be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth on April 21 were it not for her first and most famous novel, Jane Eyre, which has never been out of print since it was published in 1847 and is now a cornerstone of our literary culture. It’s easy to see how it got there. Brontë’s skilful telling of a Cinderella love story between a poor plain governess and her surly master has an irresistible power and many elements of ripsnorting Gothic romance, with its creepy mansion, incarcerated madwoman, cruel aunt, storms, destitution, fire. It happens to be brilliantly well-written, too: Jane Eyre ticks every box. But there’s a downside to classic status; fame acts like a sort of clingfilm over a work of art, keeping it “nice”, but also inert. “Knowing about” Jane Eyre is almost unavoidable, given the large number of retellings, spin-offs, sequels, prequels, films and dramatisations the story has spawned over the years, and reading the text itself might seem somewhat superfluous, even distracting, in the circumstances. Among the hundreds of thousands who have read it, people are more likely to remember scenes such as Jane standing up to her bullying aunt and the teachers at Lowood School, or proudly refusing Rochester’s plan to keep her as his mistress, without remembering the stringent principles underlying the drama. The book has become beloved and irreplaceable, but has lost a lot of its power to shock.

- ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart,’ by Claire Harman [The New York Times Book Review]

No sooner has Jane Eyre discovered that her dear master is a married man than she gives him up. “I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.” She will not be Mr. Rochester’s mistress; she nearly becomes a missionary. But the works of the Lord are great: The wife dies. Jane nurses Mr. Rochester back to health. More important, she saves his soul. All his life, he had been an “irreligious dog,” but Jane’s example has swelled his heart “with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth.” And so the novel ends with an acknowledgment that the couple’s happiness falls short of the bliss they will know in heaven. The last sentence of “Jane Eyre” isn’t “Reader, I married him” (I always forget this) but “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.”

What fault could the sternest Victorian moralists have found with any of that? But to the novel’s first critics, Jane was too independent and assertive, “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” Her longing for Rochester was “coarse” (that is, sexual), and as the reviewer for The Christian Remembrancer averred, the book “burns with moral Jacobinism.” Jane is always “murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor,” and so — since God decides who is born a weaver and who a viscount — the novel was thought to be criticizing “God’s appointment,” a kind of blasphemy. Never mind that Queen Victoria stayed up late reading it to Prince Albert. “Jane Eyre” was an “immoral,” even a “dangerous” book, and whoever was behind the authorial pseudonym “Currer Bell” was in possession of a sordid mind.

- Charlotte Bronte and Her Best Friend's Broken Promise by Laura June [Jezebel]

One of the best documented novelists of the 19th century is Charlotte Brontë, thanks in large part to the fact that she was a lifelong, avid writer of notes, stories, little (sometimes just three inches tall) books and manuscripts, and of letters. Over her lifetime Charlotte wrote thousands of letters to a wide array of correspondents: her family, when she was away from home; close friends; and later in life, her publisher and editors, as well as other famous writers. Her two longest correspondences were with her closest school friends—the smart, outspoken, and liberal Mary Taylor, and the quiet, more proper Ellen Nussey. Much of what we know of Charlotte’s life is thanks to Miss Nussey, who disobeyed a classic but understandable request.

Previously.

posted by Fizz (9 comments total)

her greatest creation

The Brontësaurus.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:09 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Needs mention of Jasper Fforde who kicked off an entire meta-comedic-sci-fi series by asking "What if books were like actual worlds and someone could break into Jane Eyre and mess with the narrative?"
posted by emjaybee at 2:00 PM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Nothing to add, but very nice post. Thanks.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 3:01 PM on April 18, 2016

"What if books were like actual worlds and someone could break into Jane Eyre and mess with the narrative?"

Ah yes, not unlike my intense desire whilst reading Wuthering Heights (another Brontë book I loved) to break into the novel and kick Heathcliff's ass.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:09 PM on April 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Just this weekend, I was thinking that my next cat's name would be Currer Bell.

And no thread about Charlotte Bronte would be complete without Kate Beaton's divine Dude Watchin' with the Brontes.
posted by mogget at 3:45 PM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've always enjoyed the Shrinklits version.
posted by nightwood at 7:57 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

I hated everyone in Wuthering Heights, they all deserved ass-kickings. Nowadays I often think of Jane as a ver young, very smart woman who married a rich man 20 years her elder who would never be able to wander off and get in trouble thanks to his disabilities and think "hmmm."
posted by emjaybee at 8:15 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I started rereading Jane Eyre for the first time since my early teens after reading the Guardian article. It really bears rereading as an adult after many years. It is such a powerful book about being female. Just before this I read House of Mirth for the first time, and I recommend it as a double bill - not because of the opposite trajectories of the two protagonists, but in how their characters and desires shape those trajectories.
posted by tavegyl at 10:25 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Thankyou for this! Jane Eyre is a big big influence on me and my username is from one of her other novels. So many different and interesting ways to read the novels but however you do it Jane Eyre the character remains sympathetic, heroic, compelling and life-changing.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 6:36 AM on April 19, 2016