Original subtitles

Charlotte Bronte's great book Jane Eyre which was published on the 19th of

October 1847, published not by Charlotte Bronte at the time but by the male nom

de plume or pseudonym It was enormously controversial when it was published.

Some people, like the great novelist Thackeray, loved it. A lot of critics

thought it was shocking, subversive, a challenge to the morality and to the

principles of Victorian Britain. But it caused such a sensation, it accelerated

the publication of Charlotte's sister Emily's book, Wuthering Heights. And of

course, Wuthering Heights is the book with which, Tabby, we began this

podcast. It's the original friend of the show. It is, exactly.

So Jane Eyre, I think perhaps even more than Wuthering Heights, is seen as one

of the canonical books, the towering heights of Victorian literature, indeed,

perhaps all English literature. I think it's one of the best books in the

English language.

Betray My Hand right at the beginning. That's a hot take out the gates.

Well, it's not a controversial take. I think loads of critics would agree. It's

one of the most intriguing, the most...

ambiguous, fascinating, endlessly readable books ever written. And so much

to discuss in this episode. So the life of Charlotte Bronte and indeed the

Bronte family, which we talked about a bit before with Wuthering Heights, but

Charlotte's quite a different character from Emily.

Totally. The origins of Jane Eyre, the publication of the book, then these two

incredible characters, Jane herself, one of the most distinctive narrators in all

fiction, and her love interest, her master, her friend, employer, and her

kind of sexual object.

mr rochester mr rochester of course has this dark secret in the shadows which we

have a hint of there in the introduction and we'll be unraveling some of mr

rochester's secrets and indeed all the stuff about sexuality and race and

empire and all of this that lies behind the book the politics of the book which

was seen as very shocking indeed incendiary at the time and of course

whether it deserves its status as one of literature's great romances because that

relationship mr rochester and Jane Eyre is one that has absolutely captivated

millions of readers down the generations.

This episode is brought to you by Klarna. Tabby, as I was saying to you

the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go

into these great reveries when I come up with my best ideas.

I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin.

It's the same for you, isn't it? You know, I used to spend a lot of time

rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always

hoped for. But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started

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So Tabby, I've already betrayed my hand and said how good I think this book is.

What do you make of it? You said that it has this reputation for being possibly

one of the great romances. So when I first read it, I was about, I don't

know, 12 maybe.

I remember I was reading it in year eight and I'd already fallen in love

with Wuthering Heights, which I thought was so... romantic and passionate. So I

really liked Jane Eyre.

But I didn't love it because I wasn't, I didn't think it was that romantic.

I didn't find it as emotionally charged.

That impression has totally transformed over the years. To betray myself as

well, I think it is a work of absolute genius.

We were talking before we did this episode about how and all we were of

this book. So hopefully over the course of the episode, people will come to see

why we think that. But very briefly, let's get into the plot.

So as you said, Jaina is written in the early Victorian era, but it's actually

set in an earlier period. It's looking back.

Wuthering Heights.

Like Wuthering Heights, exactly.

You know, in that way, it's almost retro.

Jane Eyre is an orphan. She's raised by her horrible aunt, Mrs. Reed, and

surrounded by cousins that hate her. And she's treated cruelly from a very young

age. Then when she's 10, she is sent off to this awful puritanical school called

Lowood, run by this hypocritical clergyman called Mr. Brocklehurst. And I

think this is a part of the book that so many people remember when they think of

Jane Eyre, because the conditions are appalling. The girls... are beaten they

have their hair chopped off but it is there that Jane forms a very close

friendship with a girl called Helen Burns who's almost angelic in her

goodness yeah like a martyr saintly martyr isn't she Like a martyr.

Exactly. And she ends up dying of typhoid when she's a little girl. But

Jane stays at the school and becomes a teacher. And then at 18, she decides

that she needs to spread her wings. She needs to do something more. She's grown

restless. So she gets a job as a private governess for a little French girl

called Adele, who is the ward of the mysterious Mr. Rochester, who she

doesn't meet for quite some time. But he's the master of this vast, gloomy

house called Thornfield Hall. And strange things happen here.

Footsteps at night. laughter in the shadows fires no one knows why yeah so

there's a hint of the sort of of the gothic about this which we will come

back to so we've been through the initial stage with the reed family then

we've been to the school with the low woods and then the heart of the book a

little bit that most people do remember the most is the relationship with mr

rochester as you say they don't meet for some time. She meets him when he's

falling off his horse and she helps him. He is her master. She calls him master.

Maybe come back to this about the different meanings of this. Yeah,

erotically charged. Very erotically charged. And over time, she develops

feelings for him, which she begins, I think, to admit to herself. She sort of

struggles with them, but she's reasonably open with us.

the readers, I think. Well, she's remarkably self-knowing, Jane. She is,

exactly. Now, Mr. Rochester appears to have interests elsewhere.

So there's a local beauty called Blanche Ingram as part of a sort of posh set

that Mr. Rochester associates with. She's such a pick-me-girl, you know.

She says all the things that she thinks the boys would like.

Blanche, yeah, completely.

She's very Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice, if anyone has read that.

And her milieu, they're a group, they're a load of people who, I mean, we're very

familiar with in the show, Tabby, they're the Red Trouser Brigade of the

local area.

They totally are.

They love Paul Zerf.

Totally. They are massively Gillian Courtesy wearing.

Anyway, they turn up. Jane is very worried that Mr. Rochester is going to

marry Blanche. There's a great twist here.

There are also strange things that are happening. So, for example, at one

point, Mr. Rochester has this mysterious guest to come and stay. And this guest

overnight is attacked and bitten, isn't he?

And Jane doesn't know why.

Anyway, this is hanging there in the background.

Mysterious goings on. A wonderful scene, actually. I think one of the great

chapters in English literature when basically Mr. Rochester says to her,

I've been messing with you.

I've been, you know, I actually don't love this blanching room at all and

these red trouser people.

Yeah, I've been playing hard to get.

Yeah, it's actually you that I love and I want to marry you. And it's a

wonderful, wonderful scene.

Them walking in the gardens. One of the most beautifully written, I think,

scenes in all English literature.

It's meltingly romantic, actually, I think. And they're going to get married.

She can't believe it. The other servants are sort of stunned. And some of them

seem, you know, the way they...

slightly worries her, and we'll, of course, discover why, because when she

turns up to marry him or on the wedding day dawns... Literally the wedding day.

I mean, every bride's worst nightmare, as I can attest. You know, apart from

maybe turning up and saying that my groom is dressed as one of the creatures

from Wind in the Willows. It's Mr Toad combing his hair.

Yeah, exactly.

But she gets to the altar and then, you know, that moment where it's like, does

anyone object to this union?

And then a voice in the back says, yes. And it turns out, shockingly, that Mr.

Rochester is already married.

Who is his wife? Well, we will not be revealing yet. We'll be revealing after

the break. But suffice to say that she's one hell of a love rival. But after

this, I mean, Jane is shattered and I find this.

There are these passages when she's sort of in her bedroom, paralysed by grief,

but holds herself together and Mr. Rochester begs her to remain.

As his mistress.

As his mistress. A very shocking thing for this period.

But she holds firm and she runs away.

You know, she's reduced to wandering around the moors, begging penniless.

Totally penniless, yeah.

She's begging for crusts of bread, practically.

She gets very, very ill, but she's taken in by the Rivers family.

St. John Rivers is the local curate. And she goes on to... discovered that they

are in fact, quite improbably, her cousins.

What are the chances?

What are the chances?

But she also, along the way, comes into a great fortune. So Jane has been

penniless all her life and suddenly she's an heiress.

And then St. John Rivers, who I have quite a low opinion of, but he asked

Jane to marry him and travel to India with him as a missionary's wife. So what

will she do? Will she return to Mr. Rochester?

Will she travel to India and all likely, all possibility die?

We won't reveal until much later on in this episode.

Now, it is, as we have said, a very dramatic Gothic book in so many ways.

But actually, in Jane Eyre herself, the character, there's a lot that's drawn

from her creator, from Charlotte Bronte. And the journalist Erin Blackmore

describes her as arresting and complex, passionate, deeply intelligent,

outspoken and charmingly unaffected, which is all very Jane. And I think

before we get into Charlotte and her life, for anyone that loves the Brontes

or loves their work, as I do, it's... It's hard to understand just how kind of

quiet and isolated and lonely their lives were, particularly when we're all

acquainted with the myth of them on the moors, but also how well read they were.

So let's get into them because they were, in spite of how they are overly

mythologized, they are unusually dogged by tragedy, wouldn't you say? They are

indeed. They are. So we talked to them a bit when we did Wuthering Heights, our

very first episode. And Tabby, you and I got loads of grief from the listeners

for mispronouncing the name of... No, I got loads of... Grief from listeners.

I know, but I feel really responsible because we were discussing how to

pronounce it and I said, I'm sure it's Hayworth. And actually it's Howarth. I

very much left this portion of the notes to you, Dominic, because I just don't

want to come under fire again. I don't want the East of Eden treatment.

This is like a massive trauma for you.

Anyway, so Charlotte Bronte is the third of six children to remind people born to

Patrick Bronte and Maria Bronwell in this Yorkshire village of Thornton. And

when she's four, they move to a parsonage at Howarth on the edge of the

Yorkshire Moor. And Patrick has got basically a full-time job there. Now,

Patrick is an extraordinary character. We talked about him in the Wuthering

Heights episode.

He is eccentric.

He's very bad-tempered. He's very domineering. But he's a remarkable man

because he was born into a very poor rural family in Ireland. And then he

sort of dragged himself to the brink of the gentry through education, through

brains. He started his own school. He went to Cambridge.

He started his own school at 16, by the way. At the age of 16. I was kind of mid

-Babylonian captivity.

Starting schools was not something I would have been capable of. So that's

quite something.

From all that one hears about your school days, Tabby, you would not be.

Too busy climbing up flagpoles.

Right, exactly.

It's interesting.

Jane calls Mr. Rochester Master.

And there's a sense in which Patrick Bronte was both an inspirational figure

for his children, but also a totally domineering and overwhelming one, I

think. So there's a sense in which he's a little bit oppressive, I think, as a

father, don't you? Don't you think, Debbie?

Absolutely. So the Brontes, they're short on money. Their living conditions

are not great.

I mean, that's a massive understatement. People who listen to the Wuthering

Heights episode will remember that they made themselves ill by drinking runoff

water from the local graveyard.

Corpse water seems a bit extreme.

It's not surprising, really, given their shabby sort of conditions, that none of

the children actually live very long.

I mean, even the ones who end up as adults don't live that long. They don't

quite fit in. Of course, Patrick is an Irishman. He is an immigrant.

And there's always a sense of them being outsiders.

They are a weird family.

compared with most people at the time the tim burton stuff this is totally the

image of them isn't it completely it is so they're always wearing i mean this is

a theme in basically the bronte sisters lives they're always wearing the wrong

clothes they're always like 30 years out of date in their fashions even as

children they don't know all the games that everybody else plays you know when

they meet the other children they don't know how to play you point out tabby in

your notes that charlotte was extremely bad at ball games yes so that was

important to underline because it's it's important to relate i mean i'm not

talking about me i'm talking about you but it's important to relate to the

characters that we discuss on this show it's a long-running source of dispute

between me and tabby because tabby the number of times i point out to her that

i had my football colors that i was the captain of the baliel dynamo's football

team and she just will not listen what was it the that's the the baliel dynamo

I mean, that's hardly the elite though, is it? It's not Oxford University AFC

though. I mean, that's like saying I was like an Olympic hopscotcher or I was

like captain of the mud snorkeling team, you know? You're not listing your own

sporting achievements here, Tabby, I notice.

Yeah, I mean.

Shivering on the sidelines, looking miserable, tears rolling down your

cheeks. Someone had to bring out the D team bibs. Yeah, exactly.

Did you cut up the oranges for halftime?

Yeah. So, as you say, they don't really fit in. They're very isolated.

And I think that this is a big reason for the incredible imaginations that

they cultivated.

In their isolation, they channeled all of their energy and their lives into

other worlds, so to speak.

They're an incredibly bookish family, aren't they? I mean, the shelves lined

with books, they read everything.

We pointed this out in our Wuthering Heights episode.

People find the fact that Emily, this young girl, wrote Wuthering Heights

extraordinary, inexplicable. But in a way, it is explicable when you think of

their bookshelves that they grew up with. Surrounded by Byron, Walter Scott,

Wordsworth, Shakespeare.

No Jane Austen, actually.

But in later life, Charlotte Bronte read Jane Austen and she was incredibly

disparaging of her, which I think is so interesting because I think they're

often coupled together as these two great female writers of English

literature. Also from a young age, they are scribbling. They're all writing and

they come up with these imaginary worlds and they make up these stories. There's

Gondel. glass tile angrier and it gives you a real sense of the breadth and the

depth of their imaginations because these stories are set in Africa all over

the world the Pacific they feature the Duke of Wellington and soldiers and

seduction and vast battles they have a rich fertile inner life that they share

the siblings so for instance Charlotte Bronte wrote of their storytelling as

children we wove a web in childhood a web of sunny air which I think is

lovely. And then in 1839, the first tragedy in their lives hits. And this is

Charlotte's mother and she dies when Charlotte is only five years old. Yeah,

the first of many, isn't it? So three years later, she and her sisters,

including Emily, are sent to school, to this terrible school for clergymen's

daughters called Cowan Bridge.

And Cowan Bridge is like your absolute...

trademark kind of stereotypical 19th century school where you know it's

absolutely freezing there's no food everything is horrible and you are

subjected to this sort of um reign of terror the burnt porridge burnt porridge

so everybody who's read the low wood section in jane eyre remembers the burnt

porridge i mean tabby you and i both were sent away to school And you

remember the privations of bad food. You know, when something goes wrong like

that, it sticks in your head forever, right? There's a terrible typhoid

outbreak, as there is in Jane Eyre. Yes. They're physically punished.

They're hungry all the time. All of this kind of thing. When they're at the

school, the two of the older Bronte girls, that's Maria and Elizabeth, get

TB, don't they?

And, you know...

The school may not be single-handedly responsible, but it's probably part of

it. There's an argument that Maria Bronte is one of the inspirations for

Helen Burns, who is Jane Eyre's great friend, the kind of saintly martyr in

the book. And obviously that means that from a very early age, the Bronte

sisters are brought face to face with their own mortality, disease, death,

suffering. All of this sort of thing.

Charlotte, from a very young age, people said, well, she'll be a governess.

I mean, this is a classic Victorian thing.

Basically, if you're from a poor or reasonably poor family.

Shabby gentility, I guess.

Shabby, shabby, genteel, exactly, sort of family. And you're bright.

You'll go off to be a governess, which is.

To say, you will hold a position which is not quite that of a servant, but not

really a member of the household either. So as people sometimes said about

Victorian governesses, they were expected to have all the respectability

and all the attainments of sort of married people from the middle classes,

but they had none of their status.

So it's like this awful in-between thing where you are constantly on the edges of

high society, but you're never part of it, but nor are you going to be eating

dinner with the servants.

So where do you belong?

Exactly. So that, of course, anticipates what happens to Jane Eyre. So when Jane

gets to Thornfield Hall, she's in this sort of in-between world.

And Charlotte is so aware of this. So Charlotte wrote to Emily at one point.

She said, as a governess, I'm not considered as a living and rational.

being. And I think Charlotte, her sense of being an outsider, her sense of being

awkward, her sense of being on the fringes of something and not taken

seriously and not appreciated.

I mean, of course, that's a feeling that we all have. It's part of the human

condition. But she has it, I think, very powerfully. She's shy.

People say she's not terribly good looking.

You know, all of this finds its way into the portrait of her great narrator.

She was painfully, tragically aware of her own appearance.

People have, you know, her biographies, people who have written about her,

people that knew her, have been quite disparaging about her physical

appearance. It's interesting because there's a very well-known portrait of

her. This is the 1850 sketch by George Richmond, which is in the National

Portrait Gallery, which is how I think most people, it's kind of how she's been

immortalised and she's very elegant and quite pretty looking in that. In

reality, Elizabeth Gaskell described her as plain, so did her publisher, George

Smith, and looking very old-fashioned.

And when people say plain in the 19th century, they basically mean a bit ugly.

Am I wrong?

Yes, because she was described by both and by other people as having a head

that was slightly too big for her body. And she was, she was very, very small

and she had a fragile, slender figure, reddish brown hair. And people said that

she had a large nose, a crooked mouth and a slightly overhanging forehead,

which is just awful because all I can picture is like, I don't know, a cartoon

from Family Guy or something.

Right. Oh my God.

I didn't see that coming. Oh, and also Elizabeth Gaskell is generous enough to

mention the fact that she had lots of teeth missing.

So that's kind, close friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. But also

her eyes are glowing.

No, but I think this is really nice. This is, I think, reassuring when you've

slightly built an altar to Charlotte Bronte. Everyone said that she had

extraordinary eyes, which glowed as if some spiritual lamp had been kindled.

Obviously, that's exaggerated as an after effect. You know, you're telling

me her head is too big, her forehead literally looms over her nose. You need

to say something nice.

When you describe that, when you describe every particular genre that

adds up to, E.T.

She looks like E.T.

The overhanging head. She's very short. The glowing eyes.

Her face shone with personality.

Striking. Unconventional.

Yeah. She had a great personality. She had a wonderful sense of humour. But she

didn't. But she didn't.

And you can actually see another very well-known picture of her and her

sisters by her brother Bramwell.

Anyway, so the slightly physically unprepossessing Charlotte Bronte.

She goes to Brussels in 1842 in her early 20s to study and teach at a school

there. And it's there that she meets a man on whom it is widely suggested

Jane's relationship with Rochester

slightly based and this is constantine heger and he is the married english

master of this school and he was very supportive of charlotte's writing he

thought that she really had something so he encouraged her in that but he was a

difficult mercurial man like rochester and tellingly in the first book that

charlotte bronto ever wrote the professor it was originally called the

master as you have said jane calls mr rochester throughout master so deep

waters these and why well because charlotte was in fact with Heger. And we

know this because we have surviving letters, but this passion was entirely

unrequited. So...

Claire Harmon, who is Charlotte's biographer, has said that it's probably

because, you know, Charlotte was very inexperienced. As we said in our

Wuthering Heights episode, she barely had any experience of men in the real

world outside of her father and her brother. And she probably conflated

Heger's support of her and her writing with romance.

I think it's so sad. She wrote him this note in 1845, begging him to write to

her. This is after she'd left Brussels.

And comparing her longing, her affection to him for a starving person begging

for... crumbs and Jane actually says something like that quite similar to

Rochester at one point when she thinks she has to leave him because she thinks

that Rochester's going to marry Blanche Ingram and she says do you think I can

bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips so it's as if you know he's

her sustenance and that's kind of what Charlotte is saying in this letter Jane

is stronger and more forthright in the way that she declares it though but

Heger never replies.

We have the note because even though he ripped it up, his wife put it back

together and he used it to kind of scribble or jot or doodle in the margins

about, I don't know, somewhere to go and buy a pair of boots or something.

I'm going to use this love letter from this mad woman as a shopping list.

We've all been there. And his wife had to ask Charlotte to only write to him

every six months because she kept sending him these love letters. And so

I've always wondered if maybe there's in her portrayal of this romance between

the small, plain, poor Jane Eyre and this...

fiery, mercurial man, whether or not there's an element of wish fulfilment

for Charlotte, imagining the future she would have hoped for.

So I think that's quite touching. I think Rochester, there's a bit of him

there. I think there's a bit of her. I mean, lots of biographers think, I think

there's a bit of her father.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that in itself raises quite an interesting point

because Emily...

obviously also wrote dark angry saturnine man and so why why is it that

they both write quite similar characters and i think some people say well it's

because you know they both grew up with the same father but actually i think

surely the bigger reason is they're reading as we will see yeah well

especially they love byron don't they and we'll come on to byron a little bit

later anyway so how do they get into writing charlotte comes back from

brussels 1844 she starts reading her sister emily's poem she's like god these

are brilliant and the three of them that is to say charlotte emily and their

sister send all their stuff to London publishers under the assumed names

Currer, Ellis and Acton. They're worried, quite rightly, in the world of

the 1840s, if they publish as women, they will be judged purely as women

writers and they want to be judged on their own merits.

They're sex irrelevant.

So that's why they choose these sort of androgynous names.

Goes back to what we said about Louisa May Alcott, who wrote and was judged as

a female.

Yes, exactly. Exactly so. But the early years of Charlotte's literary career, of

course, are dogged by the family tragedies. Basically, they all start to

die. Their brother, Bramwell, who's an artist and a poet, but is basically off

his face on booze and laudanum, he dies. At his funeral, Emily catches what she

gets. She gets like a pneumonia or a fever or something.

refuses a doctor, dies, has like the world's smallest coffin because she's

quite possibly got an eating disorder.

Then Anne dies as well.

And basically Charlotte, who was part of this extremely tight family group,

suddenly finds they're all, a lot of them are dead.

Well, they're all dead, actually. She says, I feel...

blind with grief.

One by one, I have watched them fall asleep on my arm and closed their glazed

eyes. I mean, this is heartbreaking.

It's heartbreaking stuff. And also, let's not forget, these are unusually

close siblings because they're so isolated.

They've just had each other. And so after this, you know, unsurprisingly,

she has some very, very dark periods, very low periods. It's actually

Villette. You mentioned Villette. I did Villette at school. I found it

unbelievably boring, actually. I found it really boring too.

I can barely remember it. But it's all set in Belgium.

With a bloke that she falls in love with. It's basically that. But nothing

really happens.

Nothing happens, except there's a very long description, or at least a very

striking description, of how she succumbs to depression.

I think one of the first descriptions of depression in English literature.

And, you know, she has nervous breakdowns all her life.

She does actually get married, though, doesn't she, in 1854?

Yeah, this is, I think, something a lot of people forget about Charlotte Bronte.

In 1854, she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nichols. It took

some persuading, but eventually she... agreed her father was very against this

slightly hypocritically because he was very proud of charlotte's fame and

success and he thought that nichols as a poor irishman was beneath her anyway

nevertheless mary they did in june of that year patrick didn't come to the

wedding nice nice in a strange turn of events they um moved into patrick's

parsonage so Slightly awkward cohabitation.

He doesn't go to the wedding, but they turn up like a few hours later to say,

we've come to live with you. Exactly. She wrote to her friend and her long

-term correspondent, Ellen Nussie, and we have a lot of their letters.

I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintance

to marry are much to blame.

Indeed, indeed, Nell. It is strange and solemn and a perilous thing for a woman

to become a wife.

Man's lot is far, far different.

He's having a brilliant time, but I'm having a terrible one. Yeah, exactly.

Hardly matrimonial. bliss there but then again quite sweetly Arthur grew on her

because she wrote in the letter six months later that Arthur was a dear boy

and he is dearer to me today than he was six months ago I mean arguably that's

not a massive improvement because she loathed him six months ago but I think

that's rather sweet and also hope for us all soon to be walking down the aisle.

And also there are accounts written by the two servants who were working at the

parsonage who worked for the family and they reported that the couple were very

happy. But alas, not for long.

Charlotte became pregnant very quickly and she fell ill and died along with her

unborn baby on the 31st of March, 1855 at only 38 years old. 38 years old and

the oldest surviving Bronte.

So that's sad.

It is sad. It is sad. Tragic life, tragic story of the Brontes. Of course,

that explains why there's the Bronte industry to some degree, because tragedy

always sells.

Absolutely. But of course, the big reason there's a Bronte industry is that

the books are so good. Let's turn to Jane Eyre itself.

Where does she get the idea for Jane Eyre?

Well, lots of literary scholars have said the place that is at the centre of

the book, the place that everybody remembers, not so much Lowood, the

school, it's Thornfield Hall. It's the place where she meets Mr. Rochester. And

that this is based on a real place.

in derbyshire this place north lees hall belonged to a family called the heirs or

the heirs are very big in the local area and the story went sort of legend had it

that the mistress of the house many years ago had been locked up in a padded

room on the second floor because she went mad and then she burned to death

big spoiler there for everyone yeah and we know that charlotte bronte visited

north lees house in 1845, don't we? So that's one of the great inspirations.

There are other inspirations, of course. So Claire Harmon points out that Patrick

Bronte had written a book about a virtuous girl fighting off a rake.

Perhaps not entirely improbable because his wife did call him Saucy Pat.

Saucy Pat?

Yeah. So he's the rake in this?

Well, I don't know, but I think he probably had a slightly more

melodramatic side to him than we might think, than just the puritanical

minister. The Brontes' world is made up of books. They're an incredibly bookish

family. So the idea that these are kind of wild children of the Moors who are

just drawing on nature with their own imaginations is not right. Jane Eyre.

as lots of literary scholars have said, is full of literary illusions. It's full

of Milton is in there, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare is there,

Byron. You know, as Robert McCrum, critic described, says it's so steeped

in English literature, it becomes an echo chamber of earlier books. And that,

of course, is so often in the way with the great books of literary history.

For instance, a big influence on all the Brontes was Walter Scott. And she was

actually reading his book Marmion while she was writing Jane Eyre. And then also

Shakespeare and...

In the way that Jaina, in its structure, it kind of has five parts to it, which

loosely, you know, that's kind of the structure of a lot of Shakespearean

plays, the five act Shakespearean play. There's also, you can detect the

influence of...

One of my absolute favourites. And now one of your son's absolute favourites.

And this is Milton's Paradise Lost. So the satanic anti-hero. There is this

journey of a spiritual fall and then a redemption.

So always delighted to get Milton into the show. And then another old friend of

what I would consider to be more of a sort of tedious acquaintance. And that

is John Bunyan and his book Pilgrim's Progress.

So don't forget the Brontes are a Protestant household and it was very

familiar to them all growing up. As it was.

to Louisa May Alcott, who was also a big fan of the Brontes.

So it's all connected.

John Buchan, the 39 Steps drummer, John Buchan, used to act out the Pilgrim's

Progress. So everyone forgets Pilgrim's Progress now. And we've been dismissive

about it on the show because I always think it sounds really boring.

I think it sounds so boring. But for so much of literary history, the Pilgrim's

Progress was an absolute foundational text. And basically the idea of a series

of trials and temptations.

over you know and our narrator our protagonist emerges triumphant at the

end having proved themselves they've gone through despond and vice and all of

this kind of stuff and they emerge a better person at the end it's like the

hero's journey from greek tragedy but but christianized because it's it's all

about you know there's a blessed relief at the end of it and you're spiritually

wiser and more enlightened by the end of it and going through the different

stages

The five stops.

Exactly. So it's Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End, and then

ultimately Fern Dean.

But I think one of the greatest influences on Jane Eyre, as with

Wuthering Heights, and actually also on the tenant of Wildfell Hall and Bronte's

book, is Gothic fiction. So we know that the Brontes were immersed in Gothic

fiction growing up. They read Blackwell's Magazine. They read, for

instance, James Hogg. These stories about demonic possession, this vampire

fad of the kind of mid-18th century were starting to penetrate literature. So

they were reading a lot of vampire stories.

And you can see the imprint of this in Jane Eyre, Thornfield Hall, this large,

looming Gothic mansion.

There's the red room that Jane as a little girl is thrust into when she

behaves badly and she believes that there are ghosts lurking in the corners

of that room. I mean, the red room, we haven't really talked about the red

room, maybe we'll talk about it later, but it's such a, it's a really, you

know, again, literary critics, particularly feminist literary critics,

love this red room. As a child, she's sort of locked up all the meaning,

different meanings that the red room might have. And it's a very, And this is

a mad thing to say, and I'm reading The Shining at the moment. And I kind of

imagine the Red Room is one of the rooms of the Overlook Hotel or something.

Totally. I think that's absolutely valid.

Then there is Rochester's ghoulish secret lurking in the shadows, which we

will get to. And it's the way that the book is constantly tantalising and

teasing the prospect of supernatural horror. And it builds suspense in the

way that gothic novels so often do.

And it's full of these hauntings. It's this thing where enchantment and... fear

coexist side by side in the figure of Jane as well.

So it's undeniably a massive, massive part of Jane Eyre. Well, I think the big

thing about this is that Jane herself is aware of this. She's a very, very self

-aware narrator.

She's a very reflective and thoughtful narrator.

And, you know, one of the things that's, again, that's on our minds as the book

proceeds is the influence of kind of, is this going to be like a fairy story, a

sort of Bluebeard style thing?

Cinderella. Yeah, has Mr. Rochester got all his old wives locked up in their

severed heads in some secret room or whatever?

And Jane herself talks.

I mean, this is one of the things you see. Jane talks about the memories of

nursery stories.

And she says, and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigor and

vividness beyond what childhood could give.

There's a point when she's outside, she sees the horse coming towards her

through the dusk, and she remembers tales that she has been told by her kind

of... nurse when she was little of a North England spirit called a guy trash.

I love this bit because I love folk.

folklore yeah we never established you're a massive folklore enthusiast

yeah so i was excited by this which in the form of horse mule or large dog

haunted solitary ways and sometimes came upon belated travelers as this horse was

now coming upon me and this sort of sense she has a fantastically rich

imagination yeah and that that you know we sense that as readers and that gives

the book this lovely extra kind of texture that even Though, as we'll go on

to describe, this is in many ways a realist novel, one grounded in objective

reality and in the painstaking descriptions of people and places and

things. The line between the natural and the supernatural is a little bit thin,

and that's what gives it the kind of gothic quality.

And Rochester is always describing Jane as unearthly, strange, like a fairy. And

they share this almost supernatural connection. And it does, you're right,

it elevates the book. And then there's also the romantic.

poets who Charlotte Bronte loved.

So Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Coleridge. There's a strong dose of that kind of

writing in this, in the nature writing of the book, which is beautiful. And in

that lovely scene where Jane and Rochester get... engaged. There's

obvious nods to John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. Yeah, it's a twilight

garden. Yeah. So for instance, lines like, the little brown birds which

stirred occasionally in the hedge looked like single russet leaves I'd forgotten

to drop.

I mean, that's such gorgeous writing.

And then as you say, it is also the realist novel, you know, it's rooted in

the tradition of 19th century realism. So this is the domesticity. We always

know what people are wearing. We're always told what Jane is wearing. The

fact that we are told what characters see.

and hear and touch the opening line of the novel for instance is deceptively

casual there was no possibility of taking a walk that day and I think the

way that Charlotte Bronte weaves that realism together with the enchanted

gothic feel of it that we were just talking about. I think that is a huge

part of its genius. And that's something that Wuthering Heights doesn't really

do. It's not really rooted in the real world in the same way.

Agreed. I think Wuthering Heights is more one note. I think this functions on

lots of different levels. So many different planes.

Yeah. One of the first reviewers, I read this this morning, actually, before we

started recording, a guy called George Henry Lewis in 1847.

He said, reality, deep, significant reality is the great characteristic of

the book. And this sort of sense that it is. there is an objective everyday 19th

century Victorian reality to the book and yet there is also this great mythic

quality of Mr. Rochester and you know his secret and the supernatural elements

and the gothic and the fact that it touches all these different things and

it has this kind of it's ambiguously situated we feel like we're in the real

world but there are so many different dimensions to it the natural world the

romantic the gothic and all of this kind of thing I mean it contains volumes but

it's a real world in which we we know what the wall looks like and what

they're eating for dinner but behind that wallpaper there very well may be

fairies and ghouls and goblins and something more I can see why this

appeals to you Tabby because this is completely your right up my street yeah

this is Tabitha Syrett bingo exactly so she's done it How is it published?

I mean, this is an interesting story. It is actually.

So the publisher, Thomas Newby, has agreed to do Wuthering Heights by Emily.

And Charlotte sends him her own book, The Professor.

And Newby says, no good. You know, I don't want to do The Professor. It's

rubbish. So Newby has rejected The Professor.

Charlotte then works on Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is rejected, but it's picked up by

another publisher, George Smith. And he said when he first read it, the story

quickly took me captive. Before 12 o'clock, my horse came to the door, but

I could not put the book down.

Anyone who's read Jane Eyre will find that very familiar, I think. So Smith

rushes out Jane Eyre under the title Jane Eyre, an autobiography. And this is

a classic kind of novelistic conceit.

to pretend that it's real and it's a real autobiography. And they pretend

that Currabel is merely the editor.

And by the way, George Smith hasn't met Charlotte Bronte at this point. He

doesn't know that she's a woman. Oh, nice. That's a good fact. It's a huge

hit, very successful, and actually so successful that Smith Elder and

Company, that their rival Thomas Newby, rush out Wuthering Heights to try to

capitalise on the enthusiasm. As we said at the beginning, the critics are not...

unanimously favourable, though, are they? One of Charlotte Bronte's heroes,

William Makepeace Thackeray, say, this is brilliant.

Exceedingly moved and pleased, Thackeray said he was when he read it. Lots of

critics said, God, we found this amazing new writer, Carabelle, who knows who

Carabelle is, a new style, all of this.

However, there are also critics at the time who say, no, this book is shocking.

It's ungodly.

It is unchristian. It is subversive. The most famous review, Notorious, Elizabeth

Rigby in the Quarterly Review, 1848, says this book is basically an act of

social rebellion.

There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and

against the privations of the poor. And she actually goes on to say, it must be

a man, and if it's not the work of a man, if it's a woman, then that woman

must be a sexual delinquent.

I mean, it's hardly Fifty Shades of Grey.

Well, it's not even A Court of Thorns and Roses.

No. Oh, my God. I think she would have seen Sarah J Maas just burst into

flames. Exactly.

The minute that she crossed the threshold.

But, of course, a book that is very shocking and is seen as the work of a

sexual delinquent, I mean, there could hardly be a better recommendation.

Everyone's going to get a hold of a copy.

Exactly.

It's a huge success.

Thackeray's daughter said it has set all London talking, reading, speculating.

People want to know who wrote it.

You know, actually, there's a funny little story about Thackeray.

Charlotte Bronte dedicated the second edition to him. And then later that was

considered really controversial because she didn't know at the time, again, a

bit of a spoiler here, that Thackeray himself had had his wife declared insane

and committed.

Such a theme.

Woman in white again. So lots of speculation at the time about who wrote

it. And Charlotte Bronte never admitted it. No.

And also she was unsettled. I mean, she's a shy, quiet.

Quite a lonely person. She was unnerved by the notoriety and she always denied

that she'd written it. Also, possibly because she had modelled places and

characters on real life and she didn't want the connection to be made. Perhaps

rightly because Elizabeth Gaskell came under a lot of fire later for saying

that Brocklehurst was based on this guy called Reverend Caris Wilson.

And then the people that liked Caris Wilson came back and they said that she

had to retract what she'd said. But then eventually...

Charlotte and Anne travelled to London in 1848 and they revealed their true

identities to the publisher because there were all these rumours and false

claims going around. So they wanted to definitively put that to bed. But I

think that's quite a nice image, isn't it? These two young women stepping into

a publisher's office for the first time. Yeah, lovely.

And it was pretty much an open secret from 1850 that the writer was this

woman, Charlotte Bronte. And she was actually publicly connected to Jane

Eyre. But she did spend the rest of her life basically hiding behind the

pseudonym. She was genuinely upset by the moral... And she later wrote in a

preface. to a different edition.

Conventionality is not morality.

Self-righteousness is not religion.

To attack the first is not to assail the last.

And I think that's well said, actually. But it made me wonder whether, you know,

that, the fact that she released a later edition of Wuthering Heights, cutting

out a lot of the more frenzied, passionate elements of it and wrote a

defence of her sister, Emily. The fact that she prevented the tenet of Wildfell

Hall after its initial 1848 publication from being released again until 1854

because she was shocked by it and she didn't like it. that other people were

shocked by it. I wonder if there is an element of Charlotte Bronte's nature

where she...

cared a lot about what people thought of her. She wanted to be respectable and

fit in, but actually she was brimming with fire and passionate views and so

uses her prose to manifest that, to release that. Makes total sense.

She wrote to her friend, Ellen Nussie, I keep trying to do right, checking wrong

feelings and repressing wrong thoughts, but still every instant I find myself

going astray. I abhor myself. I despise myself, which is such an extreme thing

to say of oneself.

And Jane has similar sentiments at one point in the book. Anyway, she's

definitively outed. by Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, which was itself a

huge sensation and a huge hit. A hit to rival that of Jane Eyre. And people

could finally put a name to the face and put a name and a face to the book,

couldn't they? And that's basically the book that kickstarted the Bronte

industry. So it creates the idea of the Bronte myth, the windswept moors, the

isolated strange family who are producing these works of absolute

genius. From nowhere.

Yeah, and that has endured ever since.

And actually, as with... I mean, we've got to stop.

at some point comparing it to Wuthering Heights but as with Wuthering Heights

one of the things that is perhaps lost amid all this I mean the fascination

with the writers with the Brontes and their weird world and their sort of

slightly tortured lives their corpse water yeah their corpse water what is

lost is the complexity and the sophistication of the book and this book

in particular I think because for me it's one of the great achievements in

English writing I mean, so far ahead of even loads of other kind of canonical

books. It's endlessly fascinating.

And actually, we could do 100 podcasts on it and we wouldn't exhaust all the

nuances and ambiguities of the book. So actually, I'll tell you what we should

do, Tabby. We should probably take a break. And then, shall we talk about

Jaina herself?

We should talk about Mr.

Rochester, why the book is considered so subversive and so radical.

And finally, we'll go into the attic to find the secret at the heart of the

book. Oh my God, it's so exciting. Huge.

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Book Club. Now, before we get back into Jane

Eyre, just a reminder to join our own community of slightly downtrodden

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This is the real thing. You will not be jilted at the altar.

This is the elite circle. It is.

Right. Talking of being jilted at the altar, Tabby.

Hello.

I know you are gagging to talk about the narrative voice in Jane Eyre, aren't

you? So that's how we start. We get into the book. We're in Jane's head.

And this is very unusual.

The idea of a first person epistolary narrative is not that unusual.

It's very popular in the 18th century.

So that's where you are in the reader's head and it's like she's speaking to

you. You're party to her most private revelations. But Jane Eyre is unusual.

It's an unusually feminine voice, which is funny given that a lot of people

thought the writer was male. And she speaks more directly to you than is

normal. So for instance, she will say, oh, romantic reader, forgive me for

telling the plain truth.

And at the time, this was an innovatively.

personal and it was unusual in its acuity i mean it was almost original so

robert mccrumb says that because of this jane eyre is the forerunner of the novel

of the interior consciousness and i think it's one of the best things about

the book and thackeray so he's come up a lot on the show because he was a big

hero of Bronte's. He says of Jane's narrative voice, which of her readers

has not been her friend? And that is how it feels. She's tender and intimate, and

yet she's forthright and honest.

She's emotionally naked, but she continues to confide. So you feel like

you trust her, that you see all sides of her. And you feel like you trust her

because she is also unusually self-knowing. Yes. I think that's

absolutely the point, isn't it? She's reflective and self-knowing. Her

narrative voice, she's aware of you existing. I mean, that's very unusual.

She addresses you directly as reader. I remember there was a sketch in A Bit of

Fry and Laurie, the Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie sketch show. This is a big

favourite of authors, isn't it? It is, yeah. I know you've bonded about this.

When Hugh Laurie goes in to complain in a bookshop, he says, I bought this book,

Jane Eyre. It's absolute rubbish.

And he says, she keeps saying, reader, I did this. And he's like, he says, excuse

my language, the silly bitch doesn't even know me.

But the fact that we know her, of course, is so central to the book's

appeal. But it also interestingly sets up an idea of multiple Jane Eyres. So in

other words, the Jane Eyre who is for whom the events are happening, but also

a later Jane Eyre.

who's telling us the story subsequently and is able to be self-knowing and to be

thoughtful about her past selves.

And I think that's a really, really clever trick. You don't really think

about it until you first notice it. And then you realise that there's different

Jane Eyres in time. There's the one telling us the story and then there's

the Jane Eyres who are moving through the series of trials and temptations and

stuff. But because you're so bought into her world and her life and the things

that happen to her.

She's a wonderful character, I think, Jane Eyre, because she's not perfect.

She has flaws. She has her pride. she has her weaknesses she has her anxieties

she has rage actually yeah but she is thoughtful she's very watchful she is

very bright she has a wonderful sense Jane

of her own self and her own self-worth. And she will not be kept down. I mean,

that's the theme of the very first section when she's within the reeds and

they put her in the red room.

I mean, people are always trying to cage her, to imprison her as something. And

she's trying to escape. So that starts with the red room and then the school.

And I think the single biggest thing about Jane that is innovative, actually,

for a Victorian female character, she will not be defined and downtrodden by

other people. Figures of authority have no... don't cow her one bit no she

doesn't have parents she doesn't she has friends but she doesn't have that much

help she has to make her own way in the world but she is a terrifically

resilient character and actually she defines herself in many ways through

resisting others doesn't she I've never in my life have known any medium in my

dealings with positive hard characters between absolute submission and

determined revolt and determined revolt is one of the things I mean she's always

caught between these things because of course the way she calls Rochester

master, suggests kind of submissiveness.

But she is determined to, I mean, determined to revolt, you know, is the

essence of her personality.

She's poor.

She's not well favoured by circumstance.

You know, she's not good looking. She can't use her sex appeal.

Her plainness is an important facet of her character. And it was important to

Charlotte Bronte that she said that she'd be as short and plain as me. And

also in sort of stories that have some sort of heroic arc, there's often a glow

up. moment for the lead character that never happens to jane she remains plain

but her value her treasure her glitter comes from totally what is within her

not one part of her external appearance that's so true because when rochester mr

rochester wants to give her a glow up she doesn't like it she says i want to

be me yeah i mean what you got what you got yeah are we talking no

I mean, I bring it on.

Yeah, of course you would.

Of course you would. I saw you at the photo shoot and you were all in for it.

I know, I was flicking my hair.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I was there with my jumper. You were flicking your hair.

I wasn't flicking my hair. I was absolutely gutted. I was raging. Just to

explain to the listeners, this is going to be the ultimate glimpse in the

reality of the book club. We had a photo shoot to promote this show and Tabby had

all these lovely clothes and we all chatted with the stylist about her

clothes. And then I said to the stylist, And where did my jumper come from?

Yours was stuff like caramel and all that. Where does my jumper come from?

And she just looked at me and she said, well, the shirt's from Amazon and the

jumper's from M&S.

And I was so deflated.

You know, sometimes you can over-guild the lily and we wouldn't have wanted to

do that to you. They wanted my natural beauty to come through. To shine

through. Exactly.

Let's return to Jane Eyre.

She's passionate, isn't she? There are two sides to Jane Eyre. I mean, she's a

complicated...

She feels real. She feels three-dimensional.

Because on the one hand, she's very calm, cool, rational, thoughtful,

reflective. She lectures herself. And I think that's such a good way, that's

such a lesson to myself.

You know, to have a little word with myself from time to time and be like,

stopping a brat.

Really? I've never, has this ever happened?

No, well, you never would. But that's because I'm a more self-knowing person

than you. No, but I've never seen this from you.

Oh, no, no, but exactly. But I think we should all take leaves out of Jane's

book because she'll say to herself, come on, Jane, pull yourself together in one

breath while in the next she's declaring that she is everyone's equal. She is

Rochester's equal. And that's a wonderful duality. There's this

extremely well-known passage where she has a rant at Rochester.

Feminist critics understandably love it. Maybe you should read it, Tabby. When I

first read this when I was 12, this was a... passage that i was pretty drawn

through and i memorized it oh my god you can do it from memory well you're gonna

have to look at your notes oh i don't know if i still can i don't know if i

still can i'll try though okay wait um

Do you think I can stay and become nothing to you? Do you think I'm an

automaton? Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little that I

am soulless and heartless? You think wrong. I have as much soul as you and

full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much

wealth, I would have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to

leave you.

Almost, almost by heart. Oh, well done.

So for people who are only listening and not watching, Tabby had to look down

once at the God bit, but the rest of it you did do from memory. That's an

extraordinary...

piece of writing for that period, for any period of writing, for any period.

That's astonishing.

She's claiming her right to matter, even though she exists in a society where she

matters not one jot. Saying that as a woman, she is Rochester's equal. And

it's also just beautiful, articulate prose that nevertheless is imbued with

incredible heart.

Oh, it's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. Do you think because I'm poor

and obscure and plain, I don't matter? I have as much soul as you do. I love it.

The organisation of the words, poor, obscure, plain and little, that has a

gorgeous rhythm to it. Agreed. So that's Jane.

We love Jane. Brilliant. And now we come to, now I really am looking in the

mirror. That comparison has dogged you all your life.

Mr. Rochester.

Dominic Rochester.

So brooding, dark, masterful. You're Edgar Linton and we all know it, okay?

Come on. Is that Clem Fandango?

That's played by Clem Fandango, isn't it?

Edgar Linton.

I'm absolutely not Edgar Linton, just to be absolutely clear. So Mr. Rochester,

he's... the sort of cousin of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but he's a much

better character than Heathcliff, I think. They're both dark-haired, they're

both swarthy, they're both rugged and brooding and all of this, and they're

both clearly derived from Lord Byron, who the Brontes adored. And Rochester

arrives in the story as a character from a gothic romance, doesn't he? He's

riding this gigantic black horse, he's got the huge black... Dog. Loping at his

side. Exactly.

It's twilight.

He had a dark face with stern features and a heavy brow. His eyes and gathered

eyebrows looked eyeful and thwarted. He was past youth but had not reached

middle age. I felt no fear of him but little shyness.

And clearly he is...

You know, he's meant to be very... He's not handsome.

It is stressed many times, isn't it? It's important, yeah.

That he's not conventionally good looking. Again, maybe a parallel. But he

exudes terrific sex appeal.

There it is.

Yeah, there it is. Honestly.

Put down that mirror. It's extraordinary.

Unbelievable.

And so going back to the sex appeal. So obviously...

Heathcliff is the character who has endured as a sex symbol. I don't think

Rochester has to the same degree, though at the time, the Quarterly Review warned

that the generosity and honour of his character is almost like a trap.

It means that it enchants lady readers to overlook.

that he is deliberately and secretly seeking to violate the laws of God. And

that's a reference to the fact that he asked Jane to remain as his mistress.

But he is a much more likable character.

He's less violent. He's less vengeful. He actually has a very good sense of

humour. And I think that he's not so much a bad boy in the way that

Heathcliff is. And I think that's why Heathcliff has this sex appeal to us

now. So, I mean, put it this way, Jacob Elordi would never play Rochester. And

he certainly would never play Rochester with a gold tooth and an earring.

He's not that wild and un... tamed Rochester.

You know, he's a much more sensible, good-natured person.

Yeah, I agree. He's more three-dimensional than Heathcliff. He's

not a melodramatic caricature.

He's playful, actually.

Yeah, he can be quite wry. He's very sardonic, but he can be good-humoured.

There's the tremendous bants of him dressing up as the gypsy fortune teller.

Yes, great. A lot of cross-dressing on the book club. Have you noticed that?

I think there's a lovely flirtatiousness, actually, in their

relationship. There really is.

Which you don't really see. I was trying to think of examples.

in English literature before this, of a relationship between two characters that

is so nicely judged. So there's not, you know, there's lots of sexy

relationships. There's lots of sort of erotic relationships and things, but not

one where there is a playfulness and a wryness.

No, because even Austin's books.

The love interest. They're never that playful, are they? No, they're not. And

there's not the sensuality in Jane Austen, really, is there? I mean, that's

the one thing that the Brontes didn't like about Jane Austen. They thought

Jane Austen was a bit... Contained.

Yeah, and a bit pallid and a bit bloodless.

I think they're wrong about that. But yes, yeah, yeah. I think they're wrong

about it too. But I think you do have to work harder as a reader to put the

sensuality into Jane Austen, whereas here the sensuality, the physicality of

their relationship.

And the sense of a kind of chemistry between them and the magnetism between

them. He looms over her and she's small and yet she has this strange power over

him. I think that's it, isn't it? And so actually, even though she calls him

master. you absolutely feel that she has a power over him. Yeah. And that there's

an irony to that. And I love that. There is a slight hint of the solo masochism

that we get in Wuthering Heights because, you know, he's dangling Blanche

Ingram in front of her and saying, oh, I like her.

And so he's, you know, he's basically playing hard to get. And then Jane is

always taunting him. You know, she's saying, oh, you know, sir, you're very

plain. She notes the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns.

I mean, it's...

textbook flirting isn't it it is total totally is now talking about great

flirtatious relationships and people exuding a raw animal sensuality what

about St.

John Rivers so when she leaves Rochester And she goes off to, by a remarkable

coincidence, to find herself living with their cousins, the Rivers family.

And there's this guy, Sinjin, who is the curate. And he is the soul of Christian

charity, of philanthropy.

And he basically says to Jane, listen, Jane, I think you should marry me and

come off to India and be missionaries. Can I read you his proposal?

Yeah, go on. Go for it. Just quickly to say before I read this, there's a

similar, so he is.

Dogmatic, chilly, pure, perfect.

So he's a lovely foil to the fire, earthiness, the flawed nature of

Rochester. So if you look at the proposal that Rochester makes to Jane

and it's full of feeling and heart and passionate emotions and declarations,

this is St. John Rivers' offering on the proposal front.

God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is not personal,

but mental endowments they have given you. You are formed for labour, not for

love. A missionary's wife you must and shall be.

You shall be mine. I claim you, not for my pleasure, but for my sovereign

service. And I'm just saying, if Whiz had proposed to me like that, not a

chance would I have agreed. God intended you for a missionary's wife.

And Jane says, you know, I would literally die if I married you. So

abominable would that be to my passion, my soul, my principles.

This is what critics didn't like, isn't it? This is what people said.

Christian critics said, this is ungodly.

This is ungodly. They say that, you know, Jane should not prioritize earthly

passion and individual conscience over piety, that she is opting for sexual

love over self-denial. They said that the book is hostile to clerics

throughout. So Mr. Brocklehurst and then in the way that Jane stands up to St.

John Rivers.

And they say that what Charlotte Bronte is doing, which I think maybe arguably

she is, is that she is morally equating this refusal of St. John and this godly

path with her refusal.

which is a clearly sinful path, to become Rochester's mistress. I actually

think that it's a very godly book. I mean, how could it not be?

Charlotte Bronte grew up with a pastor father and the book is full of godly

sentiments. So Helen Burns says at one point, you think too much of the love of

human beings. You're too impulsive, too vehement. The sovereign hand that

created your frame and put life into it has provided you with other resources.

The final lines of the book belong to St. John Rivers and they are full of

Christian...

respect for the afterlife, I suppose you would say. It's just, it's a specific

form of Christianity. I think it's a very Protestant model that is opposed to

harsh dogma and any form of clerical hypocrisy, but it doesn't mean that it's

godless. St. John Rivers represents a kind of cold, bloodless, dogmatic.

inflexible form of a relationship that would be based on subordination, her

subordination to him and be inauthentic. And I think what Charlotte Bronte, the

love, the relationship that she is trying to encourage is one that is both

physical and emotional and that is based on true and unites equality, friendship,

passion.

You know, all of these kinds of things. What Jane would be doing was she would

be denying part of her nature in going off with St. John Rivers. The passionate

side of her.

And also, I think St. John Rivers doesn't want her for her.

He wants her because he wants a kind of... He wants her labour.

Yeah, he wants a helper. He wants an assistant. But he doesn't see Jane...

Clearly, I mean, ironically, Rochester only sees Jane clearly, you could argue,

when he can't see anything else, clearly. Well, yeah, spoiler.

You're right that lots of critics didn't like that. And in fact, they didn't like

the book in general and they saw it, didn't they, as shocking.

Revolutionary. Revolutionary. And the reason they do that is because the 1840s

is a very politically anxious and turbulent time.

Revolutions across Europe in 1848.

You've got a fact here that had actually never occurred to me before.

Fantastic, actually. I'd never thought of this.

Communist Manifesto is published a year after Jane Eyre. How bizarre is that?

I actually actively looked that up because I was like, oh, I thought, as

you say, this is a period of multiple revolutions. And then I was like, you

picture Marx, you definitely don't picture Charlotte Bronte side by side,

do you?

It's a strange, one of those strange... Coincidences.

Yeah, synchronisations of history or something.

But critics at the time did see these things side by side, didn't they?

They saw Jane Eyre as part of, as a product of revolutionary turmoil.

You mentioned already, was it Elizabeth Rigby, is it, in the quarterly review?

Her critical commentary on Jane Eyre at the time, we do not hesitate to say that

the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated

every code, human, divine, abroad, and fostered chartism and rebellion at home

is the same which has also written Jane Eyre. She mentions chartism. The

Chartist movement, very big in the 1840s, demonstrated... strikes riots

petitions working class people campaigning for political reform for

universal male suffrage for greater rights and all of this one of the

strongholds of chartism is in the north so charlotte bronte would undoubtedly

have been aware of all this funnily enough her own politics she is a tory

and an anglican she is not a revolutionary but her book does, I

think, represent a challenge to stuffier, more patriarchal norms and

conventions. The language of the book.

is quite radical, I think. And we know how well read she was. I'm sure that

there's some element wherein the political language of the day was

absorbed. I don't think it's actually a stretch to say there's something of the

rhetoric of kind of human rights and some of the things that Jane says,

particularly in a newly industrialized world. So she says, am I an automaton

and a machine without feeling?

Can I bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips? On a more

personal level, she knew what it was to work hard and live often humiliatingly

alongside but beneath.

the rich, the gentry. She was a working woman in a world that often exploited,

you know, poor single working women. Think of that scene where Jane is

dismissed and mocked by the landed, aristocratic, rich Ingrams. The Gillet

people, exactly. They sneer at her because she's a mere governess. She

is... You know, they barely view her as human on the same level as themselves, I

think. Yeah, so it's like radical individualism, I would say, is the

politics of Jane Eyre. It's observable in the way that she deals with figures

of authority and her contravention of conventional class standards.

You know, she's a lowly governess, but she never submits. She stands her

ground. She never meekly accepts her low social status, particularly in her

dynamic with Rochester.

Well, it's not just her...

from the very beginning when she's with Mrs. Reed and she says, You know, she

resists Mrs.

Reed and her cousins.

I resisted all the way like any other rebel slave.

Those words would like send, you know, there'd be a lot of conservative minded

readers in the 1840s who would be like, oh dear, oh, this is very subversive.

It's France all over again.

Right, exactly.

And you're absolutely right. With Rochester, she calls him master, all

this. And yet there is always the image that you have of Rochester and Jane, as

you say, he's looming over her, but she's looking up at him pugnaciously and

she's never going to take a step back. She always claims equality with him.

Exactly. She always does.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men

feel. They suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,

precisely as men would suffer. And Jane goes on to say, doesn't she, it is

narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures, i.e. men, to basically

say women should just make puddings and knit stockings, play on the piano and

embroider bags.

In the late 1840s, that is a, I mean, that is such a... remarkable thing for a

heroine to be saying and she actively says Never mind, you know, convention

and society. She says to him, I'm not talking to you now through the medium of

custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh. It is my spirit addressing

your spirit. And she's saying that if we look at ourselves from within on the

spiritual plane, we are one. So you can see why Jane Eyre was read in many

quarters as almost a feminist manifesto when it came out. Feminist critics have

always loved this book. Yeah.

Likewise, you know, the tenant of Wildfell Hall. These were women that

knew what it was to be a downtrodden woman at this time.

And for instance, when she marries Rochester, we spoke about how he tried.

to give her a glow up. He tries to buy her lots of expensive clothes. And she

says, no, the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with annoyance and

degradation. And degradation is such a strong word because she's saying, you

can't buy me into being all equal. I already am.

And it reflects the kind of sentiments that Charlotte Bronte expressed in a lot

of her letters, saying that woman was too dependent on man, that woman was

always going to be reduced if they didn't have... cash at hand and i think

by the end of the book she spiritually redeems him and actually physically

redeems him too and even though that both of her love interests tries to turn

her into paragons of something be that christian duty or ethereal sort of

fairiness she overturns both stereotypes and says that no i'm actually this i'm

both those things at once and no i'm actually this she never allows herself

to be pigeonholed as a woman she wants them to see her for who she is rather

than to make a model of her you know love or infatuation often involves

making a sort of totem of the person rather than seeing them clearly and

she's like no you've got to meet me as jane eyre on my own terms rather than

turn try to turn me into something else now And we've said all that, and that

makes it sound unbelievably romantic.

You can understand why so many people have seen this as the sort of ultimate

romantic fantasy.

Our counter-argument to this would be is that there's a dark, we haven't really

gone on to the secret yet, of course, that is hanging over this, but there is

a darker side to this book the whole time. You could say...

Mr. Rochester is actually a bit of a monster of a man. He's very bad

tempered. He's manipulative.

He's a bigamist.

He is a bigamist. He has been lying to Jane throughout.

And he's more than, is he more than twice her age? Is that right?

So she's 18 and he's 40.

Okay. Yeah, that, I mean.

If you were the parents of an 18-year-old and they turned up with

their 40-year-old boyfriend... Two years legal.

Yeah, you'd kind of raise your eyebrows a little bit. However, Tabby, I know

that you actually find this incredibly romantic.

Yeah, I like the way that Charlotte Bronte...

plays with romantic tropes. She plays with romantic inevitability. So I like

that because it means that I can believe in the romance more fully if I think

that she's slightly laughing at avert romance.

I think that that proposal in the orchard, regardless of what happens

later, you know, Jane's disbelief.

The teasing, the mocking, the way he then puts all his cards on the table and

begs her. The way that he really seems to see what is unique about Jane. I

think that's one of the most romantic passages in all literature.

I am no bird and no net ensnares me. She says, you know, I'm a free human being

with an independent will of my own that I now exert to leave you. And then he

says, no, you can't. My bride is here because my equal is here and my

likeness. Will you be mine? Say yes. His face was very much agitated and very

much fleshed. And there were strong workings in the features and strange

gleams in the eyes. Oh, Jane, you torture me.

Jane, accept me quickly. Say, Edward, give me my name. Edward, I will marry

you. She's so baffled.

She's like, a human earnest.

Do you truly love me?

Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife? And he says, I do. And then it's

this wonderful thing. She says, then, sir, I will marry you. I mean, honestly,

it's it's.

magnificently romantic and it's in this twilight garden.

And obviously a lot of that illusion of a happy ending is later shattered, but

that in itself is romantic because it means that romantic inevitability isn't

going to tie them together. Fate isn't going to intervene. They're going to

have to choose each other. Yeah, that's a fair point actually, because if the

book had ended right there, then it would just be a slightly Mills and Boone

fantasy of the governess who marries the master. Mr. Rochester after that is

reduced, isn't he?

And Jane is elevated.

And so they meet on terms of much more perfect equality than they would have

done if they'd got married right then and there in the orchard. I mean, it's

an interesting thing that Mr. Rochester, when they actually do get together, he

has been crushed.

He has been emasculated to some degree. He's lost some of his potency. But as

you rightly say, she then chooses, she could leave him. She could just say,

you're a wreck. I'm rich now as well. Yeah, you're also a massive liar. And

I'm like, I'm turning my back on you. She chooses him nevertheless.

And part of that is because it's one of the great depictions in literature, I

think, of a kind of something that is so hard to pin down, which is a kind of

magnetism. They just have this incredible chemistry.

Mutual respect. And that's what makes it a much more mature romance than

Wuthering Heights.

You know, they have this wonderful back and forth that we alluded to. But for

people that think, oh, well, you know, mutual respect, friendship, that's so

unsexy. There is actually an allusion to the same sort of soulmate dynamic that

exists between Kathy and Heathcliff. You know, he says at one point, I feel as if

there is a string somewhere under my left rib knotted to a similar one under

your rib. And if it snapped, I would take to bleeding internally.

So that is, there is something inexplicable. about that that transcends

earthly love yeah we believe that they have a sensual there's a sensuality and

neuroticism yeah it's it is erotic totally yeah now talking about

sensuality yeah every good romance needs to have you know a triangle

there needs to be a love rival and i would say that jane's is arguably one of

the most formidable in all uh In all literature. So reveal the dark secret

lurking in the attic of Jane Eyre. So in the attic of Thornfield, as anyone who's

read the book will know, is Rochester's first wife, who has literally been

locked up there in the loft.

Hence the laughter, the stabbings, the bitings.

Yeah, the ghostly behaviour, all this. And this is Bertha Antoinette Mason.

And she...

It's a character who contains volumes. People have written not just academic

books, but they have written novels about her because you can see her as the

representation of sexuality run amok. Alcoholism in some takes.

She's a gothic vampire because she bites people in the neck.

She's always described using animal metaphors and similes. Hyena.

I mean, this description.

So she's manly, she's big, she's...

animal, all of this kind of thing. She's called it at several points rather than

her. She's so dehumanised that why would the reader feel any sympathy for her

whatsoever? Well, this is what loads of critics have pointed out, and of course,

very, very suggestively.

She is a woman from the Caribbean.

She's a Creole woman, so she's not black, I don't think, is she? She is...

She's part of the kind of Creole elite on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica.

Rochester was tricked into marrying her, but she almost immediately, you know, he

realised this was a terrible mistake, that she was depraved. It is made very

clear to us that she is sexually licentious, that she is a woman of

enormous appetites of all kinds, but also mad.

So, I mean, we've done The Woman in White already on this show. The idea of

this sort of mad... woman that you need to lock away runs through Victorian

society and culture. Because also divorce laws at this time meant that you

couldn't divorce someone for being insane. Hence people, you know, shipping

their wives off to assailants left, right and centre. So you can see why

critics, particularly in the 60s, 70s, 80s, said, well, is she, is this about

race? Is she the dark secret of Britain's involvement in slavery and the

racism of the British Empire? Is she the violence and the evil of the empire that

has returned to haunt our native lands?

The infection of the colonies. Imperial Gothic at this time is full of these

kind of tropes. Yeah, so basically anticipating Dracula.

To some extent.

Exactly, yeah.

So there's that. Or, by contrast, it's called Jane is the ultimate English

heroine. She's an English rose.

Everything about her belies the birther's characteristics. She's small,

she's pale.

On several occasions, she's invited to go into the sun, so to speak, south of

France, to India. And she always...

stays in England. She is the embodiment of kind of, I don't know, it's almost

like Rochester looks to her to cleanse himself, her Englishness, her smallness,

her purity, to cleanse himself of his imperial stain, his imperial infection.

But at the same time, you could say Bertha represents sexuality.

She represents Rochester's dark secret. But to some degree, you could say, and

some critics have said this, she's Jane's id. She's Jane's dark secret too.

her sexual desires, her wildness, you know, all of that. Jane as a child

actively even bites someone, which is what Bertha does, you know. Jane is

often described using animal metaphors and similes likewise.

Jane is locked up in the red room and Bertha is locked up in the attic.

And the only expression of sympathy in the book.

at one point, comes from Jane. Jane chastises Rochester for thinking of his

wife so inhumanely. But it's only once, which actually has raised another thing,

which is where some people have said, this could be the point at which Jane

Eyre becomes an unreliable narrator, because she spent the whole book trying

to unseat the former Mrs. Rochester.

I.e. Bertha is unredemptive in order to redeem Mr. Rochester.

And that's Jane's purpose throughout the book. Yeah. The Creole novelist.

Jean Rees.

She wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and a massive confession now. It's one of

the landmark sort of post-war novels because it turns Victorian literature on

its head and I have never read it.

Tabby, you have read it, haven't you? I have read it and I loved it. I thought

it was a remarkable critical response, uptake, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, so what it does is it tells the story of Jane Eyre, but it tells

Bertha's story.

So she's called Antoinette Mason and in it, Rochester is a villain and it

explains why she is a prisoner. She's held captive and he's cruel to her and

she's treated badly throughout her life. And you know what? It's such a good book

because it actually manages to inhabit

world and the prose of Jane Eyre, whilst also genuinely turning Bertha into a

sympathetic protagonist.

And I have to say that once you've read it, you can't really cleanse yourself of

it. It's quite hard to read Jane Eyre without thinking of Bertha as

potentially misunderstood and potentially mistreated.

Once you've read and seen it from her perspective, the love affair between

Rochester and Jane Eyre presumably loses so much of its kind of endearing

quality. And you also think because the implication of Jane Eyre at several

points is that Bertha brings her insanity upon herself because of her

sexual voraciousness and because of her alcoholism. But actually in this, it

suggests her insanity is born of being imprisoned for so long, having her

identity taken from her, having her name changed.

And for instance...

her attempts to kill Rochester are just her attempts to escape.

That's an interesting premise. I mean, it was the first, it's become very

common now to rewrite Victorian books, but this was probably the first example

and the one that certainly critics always point to as kind of post-colonial

and all this kind of thing. I'll tell you what we're not going to do. We're

not actually going to spoil the very, very ending. I know there's loads of

chat online by people who listen to the show about spoilers.

Spoilers are sometimes hard to avoid, but we're definitely not going to tell

you what happens to Jane and Mr. Rochester. I mean, you can kind of

guess. But anyway, some of the most famous lines in all literature, the ones

that kick off the very last chapter. And again, it's an example of how this book

is so self-aware as, you know, as a novel.

Reader, I marked it in... No, I think we should... Yeah, reader, I marked it in

shaggy head bigamists, I reckon. So I'm going to give it 10 out of 10.

Oh, nice.

Love to hear it. Of course. It's one of the, I was thinking this morning before

we started recording, are there other, well, what books in English compete with

this? I think in terms of Victorian literature, I would say one or two

Dickens are as good as this, maybe Middlemarch, though I think this is much

more moving than Middlemarch is, frankly. I find Middlemarch an easier

book to admire than to love. Maybe that's fair.

Yeah. I think Jane is one of the great, the great fictional creations, as is Mr.

Rochester. I had read it before. I loved rereading it.

And as soon as I finished rereading it, I genuinely thought to myself, I'm

looking forward to reading it again in a few years time. I mean, I've been mad to

read. I mean, obviously this podcast will have to have come to an end before

I ever have time to read Jane Eyre again. Why would you do that to

yourself? But I think it's...

An unalloyed masterpiece.

And the reason so much ink has been spilled about it is because there is

just so much to say and the conversations about it will never end.

So yeah, 10 out of 10. Good. Good for you.

I'm also going to give it 10 out of 10. It's spellbinding. It's urgent.

It's just full of this emotional depth that we haven't even begun to penetrate

during the course of this discussion.

Jaina, I think is probably my...

Top three leading literary heroines of all time. Another thing that I think

people underestimate is how readable it is. You don't want to put it down. You

want to know what happens next. And to have a book of this degree of literary

sophistication, so beautifully written, and yet to inject it with intensity and

make it readable, to combine all those genres and tropes in one...

piece of writing is just, it's an extraordinary achievement.

I think maybe, I mean, I'm sure I will change my mind at some point because I'm

massively enthused right now, but I think it might be the best work of

English literature there is.

Couldn't rate it more highly.

So, 10 out of 10. Although it hasn't scored as high as The Code of the

Worcesters, which I think got 11 out of 10.

Yeah, but that's... That's an illegal saying. That's just for the sheer bants

though, isn't it? Yeah. So much to talk about with Jane Eyre and I know we've

only scratched the surface.

Don't forget...

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Club Notes.

Definitely. Book Club Notes. I mean, if you think this podcast is good, I mean,

maybe you don't, but if you think it's good, Book Club Notes is even better,

isn't it, Tabby? Are we not agreed? The newsletter's the best thing about it. I

don't know. I've kind of changed my mind. I think it's brilliant. I think

it's brilliant, but I just think the word better. You're not sucking up to

Emily anymore. That's sad.

I haven't been sufficiently rewarded, so now.

On that bombshell. Bye-bye, everybody.

Bye-bye.