All about Jane

NOTE: this page includes plot spoilers

The novel Jane Eyre was written by Charlotte Brontë, daughter of a clergyman in Yorkshire England. Her younger sisters Emily and Anne were also authors of novels and poetry, the best known of which is Emily's Wuthering Heights.

All three sisters worked as teachers and governesses and hated those jobs. They attempted to start a school of their own, but couldn't find any pupils. But then, as Charlotte wrote:

One day in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting. Of course I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse... We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors. This dream, never relinquished even with distance divided us and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency... We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and if possible, get them printed.

They took the gender-neutral pen names Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell and found a publisher for their poems, and although they sold only two copies, the mere fact that they had been published gave them the encouragement needed to produce novels. Ann wrote "Agnes Grey", Charlotte wrote "The Professor" and Emily wrote "Wuthering Heights." Ann's and Emily's novels found a publisher, but "The Professor" was rejected on the grounds that it wasn't very exciting. Charlotte's response was to try again with a new, more exciting story. In a letter to William Smith Williams she said:

My wish is to recast 'the Professor', add as well as I can, what is deficient, retrench some parts, develop others - and make of it a 3-vol. work; no easy task, I know, yet I trust not an impracticable one..."

The publishers loved Jane Eyre. In his memoir George Smith wrote:

"After breakfast on Sunday morning I took the MS. of 'Jane Eyre' to my little study, and began to read it. The story quickly took me captive. Before twelve o'clock my horse came to the door but I could not put the book down... Dinner came. For me the meal was a very hasty one, and before I went to bed that night I finished reading the manuscript. The next day we wrote to 'Currer Bell' accepting the book for publication."

William Thackery (author of Vanity Fair) also loved Jane. He wrote to William Smith Williams:

I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it... Who the author can be I can't guess, if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a 'classical' education. It is a fine book though, the man and the woman capital, the style very upright and generous so to speak..."

Charlotte Brontë was a great admirer of Thackery and was thrilled by his remarks when her publisher told her:

"...I hardly ever felt delight equal to that which cheered me when I received your letter containing an extract of a note by Mr Thackery in which he expressed himself gratified with the perusal of 'Jane Eyre.'"

Since the author's gender was in doubt, many critics took a guess. While Thackery seemed to guess the author was female, others thought either male, or both. Charles A. Dana of the Harbinger thought the book had a "manly vigor of style" and said: " In the author of "Jane Eyre," we welcome a man destined to take a decided and important position in English literature."

Edward Percy Whipple in the October 1848 edition of the North American Review thought "Jane Eyre" was the result of a brother-sister collaboration, and suspected that the manly aspects of the novel were the work of the author of "Wuthering Heights."

From the masculine tone of Jane Eyre, it might pass altogether as the composition of a man, were it not for some unconscious feminine peculiarities, which the strongest-minded woman that ever aspired after manhood cannot suppress... The leading characteristic of the novel, however, and the secret of its charm, is the clear, distinct, decisive style of its representation of character, manners, and scenery; and this continually suggests a male mind. .. There are also scenes of passion, so hot, emphatic, and condensed in expression, and so sternly masculine in feeling, that we are almost sure we observe the mind of the author of Wuthering Heights at work in the text.

Elizabeth Rigby, in the Quarterly Review of 1848 compared "Jane Eyre" unfavorably to "Vanity Fair, and thought it anti-Christian.

Altogether the auto-biography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God's appointment

But the positive reviews outweighed the negative. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine called it "the best novel of the season" and

We have rarely had the pleasure of reading a better or more interesting work of its class. "Jane Eyre" has already acquired a standard renown, and few circulating libraries, we should think, of any pretensions, are now without it. The earnest tone, deep fervour, and truthful delineation of feeling and nature displayed in its pages, must render it a general favourite."

Bronte's story was so popular that stage adaptations were being made of it even during her lifetime. The invaluable web site The Enthusiast's Guide to Jane Eyre Adaptations lists the first as Jane Eyre, or the Secrets of Thornfield Manor adapted in 1848 by John Courtney.

The version written by John Brougham in 1849 is available online at the site. Brougham's version, probably the first adaptation of "Jane Eyre" to be performed in New York City, starred Laura Keene as Jane. Keene's theatre company was performing at the Ford Theatre the night Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

Brougham's adaptation takes big liberties with the original text. Rochester's house party guests, the Ingrahms and Colonel Dent, dominate most of the action, St. John Rivers is excised along with the entire last third of the story, and Jane sounds not at all like herself:

Twelve months have passed since that fearful day. Oh, too faithful memory, why didst thou call up the loathsome picture in its terrible reality. I see it now before my eyes, as vividly as when stricken by the bolt of destiny, even at the very threshold of joy...

Lucasta Miller, author of "The Brontë Myth" writes:

In her fascinating account of the novel's afterlife, Patsy Stoneman has shown how Jane's character was increasingly tamed and domesticated in a surprisingly large number of stage adaptations which hit the theatres in the second half of the nineteenth century... Mimicking the biographers who sanitized and domesticated Charlotte Brontë, playwrights writing after Gaskell (Charlotte Brontë's first biographer, an acquaintance of Brontë and author of "Life of Charlotte Brontë") clearly felt that Jane was just too threatening to be allowed onstage in her original form... It seems as though popular Victorian literary culture could only assimilate Jane Eyre at the expense of splitting her in two, as if a heroine who is both morally upright and socially subversive was an impossible contradiction.

20th-century movies seem to have the same problem. Writes Miller:

In the 1944 film... Joan Fontaine's Jane is a meek creature, lacking the fire of the original in her exchanges with Orson Well's Rochester.

It wasn't until the feminist resurgence of the 1970s that "Jane Eyre" was reexamined in the light of Jane's social subversiveness. Miller again:

Among academics, "Wuthering Heights" had held the high ground for most of the twentieth century as the single acknowledged Brontë masterpiece... to modernists her novel seemed to offer entry into a timeless world of mythic clashing egos, whereas Charlotte's work seemed to remain stuck in what was considered the inferior realm of Victorian social realism. The connection between "Jane Eyre" and mass-market romantic fiction did not do it any favors among high-brow critics and it suffered in comparison with Emily's novel.

The disparaging of "Jane Eyre" on snobbery/misogyny grounds continued right into the 21st century. Polly Teale's Jane Eyre was reviewed by Michael Feingold of the Village Voice, who wrote:

Does anyone mind, to start with, if I find the novel itself a big yawn? I prefer my female sentimental fantasies punctured by Jane Austen - she skewered this one, well before it was written, in Northanger Abbey - just as I prefer my male heroic fantasies when Bernard Shaw is letting out their hot air. Charlotte Bronte's creative achievement was simply to recycle the tropes of the Gothic novel, as practiced half a century earlier by Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, putting them into a commercial form suitable to an age of mass production, thus spawning 150 years of - not women's writing, but lady-writing, which reached a logical, if loathsome, culmination in the Harlequin romance.

Clearly Feingold hadn't read "Jane Eyre" but knew exactly what good intellectuals are supposed to think about it. The fact that the story is about a woman also does not recommend it to New York theatre critics, who prefer their plays to be as manly, even brutal, as possible.

Charlotte had an answer for those who suggested that she try to write more like Jane Austen

I had not seen 'Pride & Prejudice' till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate dageurrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.

The 1970s brought a renewed interest in the Bertha Mason, the crazy wife in the attic, in part because of the 1966 publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys.

In the novel, Bertha Mason (Rhys calls her "Antoinette" and this New York production does too) is barely human, described as a seething animal. Rhys wanted to tell Bertha's side of the story which inevitably makes her more sympathetic. But it is difficult to tell a story in which the protagonist is completely insane. And so inevitably, Rochester becomes a symbol of colonialism and imperialism - as the book jacket of the Norton paperback says:

Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Clinical insanity isn't a satisfactory explanation for Antoinette's predicament, because you can't make political/sociological points with organic mental disease. And so Rochester, British colonialism, whatever is handy, has to take the blame for Antoinette's sad condition.

But the character Jane Eyre has survived a hateful, sexually-skewed society and yet managed to hang onto her wits. In many ways, Bertha/Antoinette is the perfect heroine of drama. The helpless suffering of women - especially women who have been driven insane - is a favorite theme of Western theatre from The Trojan Women to Ophelia to Blanche Dubois. Jane Eyre, in her victorious quest for self-determination is far more radical, especially in theatre, than Antoinette/Bertha Mason. It's not a good idea for feminists to enhance Antoinette/Bertha at Jane's expense.

The Polly Teale adaptation runs into other problems by trying to rehabilitate the mad wife in the attic. Teale uses Antoinette to represent Jane's sensual, rebellious side. Just as the Victorians could not deal with a morally upright and socially subversive heroine, the Teale adaptation suggests, perhaps not intentionally, that Jane can't be morally upright and passionately sexual. Lucasta Miller explains:

When the madwoman is discovered and the wedding between Jane and Rochester broken off, the implication of the Shared Experience production (of Teale's adaptation) is that Jane runs away because she cannot face her own passions. We are left feeling that she should have followed her instinct and united herself with Rochester anyway - that it was only fear and repression that stopped her from becoming his lover. However, this suggests a rather anachronistic view of sex outside marriage. In the original text, Jane's escape from Thornfield is presented not just as tragic self-denial but as an act of empowering self-assertion.

Living with someone who has lost their mind is difficult under the best of circumstances and the early 19th century was not the best of circumstances. Keeping Bertha/Antoinette on the third floor of Thornfield Hall may well have been the most humane way to treat her - she was not only insane but violently insane.

The most likely inspiration for the crazy wife in the attic was the wife of her former teacher and then colleague Constantin Heger, whom Charlotte believed had limited her access to Heger out of jealousy. The letters that Charlotte wrote to Heger only became public in 1913 and provoked a scandal - the public image of Charlotte did not permit unrequited love for a married man. Although Charlotte never explicitely mentioned love, it's hard not to see it in her letters to him:

I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings than always have my heart torn apart by bitter regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope - if he gives me a little - very little - I will be content, happy, I will have a reason for living - for working... I have the vague feeling that there are cold and rational people who would say on reading this 'she is raving' - The only revenge I would wish on such people is a single day of the torments that I have suffered for eight months - we would see then if they did not rave too.

Readers of "Jane Eyre" will notice that Charlotte calls Heger "my master" - the same term Jane uses often for Rochester.

How satisfying to consign Heger's inconvenient wife to an attic. It's a favorite tactic of writers, a form of sublimation. Charlotte may have been a progressive proto-feminist, but that does not mean she couldn't hold a grudge against another woman.

Illustrations of "Jane Eyre" here are by Edmund Dulac, and found at Bronteana Blog