5916_TXT.indd v
Introduction ‘We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors,’ wrote Charlotte Brontë about herself and her sisters Emily and Anne. ‘This dream, never relinquished … it took the character of a resolve’.1 By the time Charlotte wrote these lines in 1850, her sisters were dead. Tuberculosis had put an end to their short lives, yet Charlotte, Emily and Anne had all succeeded in becoming acclaimed authors. Though the name Brontë is world-famous today, the sisters’ literary works were first published under the masculine-sounding pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. ‘We had a vague impression,’ explains Charlotte, ‘that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.’2 Victorian literary culture had narrow, idealised views of women writers, who were expected to write in a ‘delicate’ and ‘sentimental’ way about such subjects as motherhood, religious faith and domestic duty. By writing and seeking publication, a woman exposed herself to criticism that she had made herself ‘less feminine’. The adoption of male pen names disguised the sisters’ true identities and created a space in which they could explore ideas more freely. Charlotte Brontë’s protagonist Jane Eyre faces social constraints because of her gender, social class and dependence on the charity of others, due to being an orphan. Like her creator, Jane rebels against these constraints, and the novel gives voice to the thoughts and feelings of a clever, spirited and passionate young woman who craves freedom. ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally,’ says Jane in Chapter 12, ‘but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do’ (p.140). From Chapter 1 onwards, the reader sees that Jane will readily stand up to authority, and do what she v
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd vi
INTRODUCTION
believes to be right, however risky the course of action. Jane Eyre, first published in 1847, covers several years of Jane’s life, portraying a range of experiences – including hardship, heartbreak and loss – and exploring a variety of themes. Jane does, eventually, enjoy the ‘perfect concord’ (p.594) of a happy marriage on intellectually and financially equal terms with her beloved Edward Fairfax Rochester. It is interesting to note that the words ‘heir’ (which Jane becomes when she inherits her uncle’s considerable fortune) and ‘air’ (with which Jane is sometimes associated in the novel) are homophones with her own surname ‘Eyre’. We might argue that Jane combines a passionate Romantic sensibility with Victorian ideals of modesty and duty. As you read the novel, you might like to reflect on the ways in which Jane conforms to certain Victorian attitudes and values while retaining her free-spirited nature. To what extent is it true that ‘no net ensnares’ her (p.330)?
Contexts Like Jane, Charlotte Brontë was no stranger to tragedy: her mother died when she was five. Thereafter, Charlotte and her five siblings were raised in Haworth, Yorkshire, by their Irish father (a Church of England priest), their mother’s sister and by Tabby, a maid. The children enjoyed playing, reading and writing together, and creating complex imaginary worlds. As an adult, Charlotte helped to support her family financially through teaching, and authored four novels and over 200 poems. She suffered the heartbreaking loss of all her siblings and died at the age of 38, probably from complications during pregnancy. She had married her father’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls only a year earlier. Her father Patrick outlived all his children.
vi
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd vii
INTRODUCTION
Children, books and education We can draw a number of parallels between events in the novel and Charlotte Brontë’s personal experiences of education – as a young reader, school pupil, governess and teacher. The young Jane in Gateshead escapes into books, as Charlotte herself did after her mother died. In Chapter 3, Jane begs the Reeds’ maid Bessie ‘to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library’, explaining to the reader that this is a book she has ‘again and again perused with delight’ (p.20). Brontë’s novel reflects her own and her family’s love of reading, and provides insights into some of the books that must have seized the imaginations of young Victorians. It is significant that Charlotte’s father actively encouraged his daughters to read just as widely and ambitiously as his son; many girls at this time would have been less fortunate. After the death of their mother, Charlotte and three of her sisters were sent to a school in Lancashire. Charlotte believed the unsanitary conditions there directly contributed to the deaths of her sisters Maria and Elizabeth. Charlotte’s description of Lowood school in Jane Eyre, particularly the spread of typhus and the tragic death of Helen Burns, was inspired by this painful personal experience. Charlotte also drew on some of the humiliations of working as a governess in Jane Eyre, for example in Chapter 17 when Rochester’s guests recount how they teased their governesses and tutors. Charlotte also taught in Brussels, where she developed passionate feelings for the married headmaster of the school, an intense experience that found expression in several of her published works, including Jane Eyre.3 The novel also has much to say about the purpose of education and the methods of educators. We can compare Mr Brocklehurst of Lowood school, who wishes to drive out sin through punishment and hardship, with Jane’s own more gentle concern as a governess and schoolmistress for her vii
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 1
CHAPTER 1 There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise, was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed. The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, ‘She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner,— something lighter, franker, more natural as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.’ ‘What does Bessie say I have done?’ I asked. ‘Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners: besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in 1
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 2
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.’ A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room. I slipped in there. It contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letter-press thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape— ‘Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.’ Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with ‘the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of 2
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 3
JANE EYRE
frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.’ Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking. I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newlyrisen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironingtable to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland. 3
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 597
Glossary Chapter 1 1
cavillers or questioners: people who grumble or make petty objections
2
moreen: a strong ribbed fabric often used for curtain-making
2
Bewick’s History of British Birds: Thomas Bewick was an accomplished wood engraver who lived and worked in the north-east of England in the 18th century. The Brontë family treasured their copy of this book and were fascinated by its illustrations, not only the ‘plates’ of birds but the small ‘tailpieces’ found at the ends of chapters.
2
promontories: headlands that jut out into the sea
2
‘Where the Northern Ocean … the stormy Hebrides’: These lines of verse come from James Thompson’s poem ‘Autumn’ (1830) and are quoted in Bewick’s book.
2–3
‘the vast sweep … rigors of extreme cold’: Jane is here quoting Bewick’s own words from the text that accompanies the engravings in his History of British Birds.
3
vignettes: small borderless illustrations
3
got up Mrs Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders: Night-caps were generally worn during this period; they were plain with perhaps a simple frilled or embroidered decoration at the front and a draw-string to make them fit snugly at the back of the head.
3
Pamela: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is a novel by the English writer Samuel Richardson.
3
Henry, Earl of Moreland: The Fool of Quality; or, The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland is a novel by the Irish writer Henry Brooke, first published in 1765–70.
4
bilious: given to nausea and vomiting; can also mean cruel or spiteful in temperament (bile is one of the four ‘humours’ or body fluids, a key idea in ancient and medieval medicine)
4
lineaments: facial features
597
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 598
GLOSSARY
4
sweetmeats: general word for sweets and other sweet food items
6
Goldsmith’s History of Rome: Oliver Goldsmith’s abridged History of Rome, first published 1769, was commonly used in 19th-century classrooms.
6
Nero, Caligula, etc.: Jane appears to have the notorious wickedness and cruelty of these particular Roman emperors in mind when she compares John Reed to Roman emperors.
Chapter 2 8
benefactress: a woman who provides help or endows a gift
8
ligature: something used to tie tightly
9
the poor-house: also known as the work-house; this is where Jane would have to live if Mrs Reed did not wish her to remain with them
9
passionate: angry, raging
10
mahogany: a reddish-coloured hardwood
10
damask: a rich, patterned fabric
10
like a tabernacle: like an altar or shrine
10
festoons: swags
10
toilet-table: piece of bedroom furniture that would originally have had a washbasin (later known as a dressing table)
10
a snowy Marseilles counterpane: a white cotton quilt or coverlet
10
divers: several, some, various
10
a miniature of her deceased husband: Small painted likenesses of loved ones were popular keepsakes in the Victorian period.
11
ottoman: a low seat or footstool, covered in fabric
12
hothouse vines: grapevines growing in a greenhouse
12
wantonly: in a deliberate and unprovoked way
12
opprobrium: harsh criticism
13
vassalage: group of servants
13
heterogeneous: dierent, unlike 598
19/11/2018 16:41
5916_TXT.indd 599
GLOSSARY
13
sanguine: optimistic, cheerful (‘sang’ or blood is one of the four ‘humours’ or body fluids, a key idea in ancient and medieval medicine)
14
the perjured: those who speak untruths
14
preternatural: unnatural, supernatural
16
parley: discussion
Chapter 3 17
apothecary: a person who sells medicines and drugs
19
fagging: chores
20
Gulliver’s Travels: satirical prose by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726
20
Lilliput and Brobdingnag: two fictional lands in Gulliver’s Travels, and their societies
21
‘In the days when we went gipsying, / A long time ago’: a popular 19th-century song
21–2
‘My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary …’: in the style of a traditional ballad
22
pettishness: irritability
23
snuff: ground tobacco kept in a snuffbox; a pinch of snuff is inhaled rather than smoked
25
caste: social class. Brontë’s novel features characters from across the social spectrum, from rich to poor, and explores a range of attitudes to social boundaries and social mobility.
25
beggarly: poverty-stricken
25
sat in the stocks, wore backboards: Stocks were used to straighten fingers, and backboards to correct posture.
27
curacy: work as a curate or parish priest
27
Welsh rabbit: a dish of toasted cheese
Chapter 4 29
boxed both my ears: slapped one or both ears as a punishment
29
homily: a moralising lecture
599
19/11/2018 16:41