jane eyre ep1

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is a significant novel that had a major impact on the history of literature. It introduced new elements to the genre of the novel, such as a frank admission of violence and a focus on the inner lives of individuals. The opening scenes of the book combine Gothic elements with a domestic setting, creating a sense of psychological violence. Jane Eyre also explores the evolution of a woman's soul from childhood to adulthood, with the protagonist's connection to Mr. Rochester transcending social barriers. Overall, the novel was a groundbreaking work that challenged traditional literary conventions. You're listening to the Secret Life of Books with Sophie G. and John T. Claypole. This episode, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Sophie, we always like to start with a reading to give a flavor of the text, but this reading is probably the shortest reading we'll ever do, and it's some of the most famous words in literature. So no pressure. Gosh, I'm a bit intimidated. This is a big one. Because in my view, you can put the emphasis on any word. You're really putting me on the spot, John T. All right, I'm going in. Reader, I married him. Very good. Where did you put the emphasis? I don't think I put any. Can you do reader, I married him? Reader, I. Reader, I married him. Yeah. Reader, I married him. In hindsight, that's the most coherent, isn't it? You married him. You did what? I've always wanted to do a rewrite of Jane Eyre. Reader, I divorced him. Yes, the sequel. The mean two version. There is a very marketable fiction either. Okay, anyone listening out there? Reader, I divorced him. Takers? Okay. Four of the most famous words in the history of the novel. They come from Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte and published in 1847. It is, in brief, a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. 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It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. It's a novel. Books are the public expression of private thoughts, private experiences, and books are also the expression of what's going on historically and intellectually behind the scenes. In that spirit, before we get to Charlotte's life and how she came to write Jane Eyre, I just wanted to ask you, Sophie, about the significance of the book in terms of that broader literary history and tradition, because it was a huge success the moment it was published. It felt very fresh to reviewers and readers in 1847, but what was new about it? Yeah, it's a great question, Jonty. It's unusual for us to start with a critical significance of the book. We usually get to that later after doing the biography, but I think in the case of Jane Eyre, as the sentence that we read, Reader, I Married Him, goes to show, its impact is enormous in terms of the way it changes the history of literature and intervenes in the genre of the novel. So it's an intervention. When I give my sort of cheat sheet account of what is a novel, a novel is a new literary technology intended to be read in private, so read alone, it's not like a play, that gives us a way in to the inner lives of an individual person and shows us how people have intimacy and share their inner lives with others. So that, to me, is what a novel does. It does lots of other things, but that's the core of it. By the time Bronte's writing Jane Eyre, the novel, as we know it, the novel in English, is about a century old. Austen's written her big novels, which themselves are sort of assembling and consolidating all the things that have happened across the early history of the novel, and Bronte picks that ball up and runs with it. And there's a frank admission of violence, which is very new. The very first scenes of the book involve the child, Jane, being subjected to both psychological and literal violence. The pivotal scene of the novel, in the Red Room, is a literalisation of the psychological landscape of Gothic narrative, which has been happening in the half century before Bronte's writing. The Red Room is where the young Jane Eyre is sent when she's perceived to be Northeast, and she's locked in this room. She has a terrifying experience, she thinks it's haunted. It's a moment of psychological torture. It's very enclosed, there's a lot of drapery and wall hangings. And she imagines that Mr. Reed, the father of the household, her uncle actually, that Mr. Reed's ghost is watching her. She's already quite abused and tortured from her experience living with her cousins, but the idea that this ghost is in the room just tips her over the edge and she completely freaks out. So the thing that really feels so fascinating to me about the opening scenes of Jane Eyre, which is set in Jane's childhood, is that it's written like a Gothic novel, but it's firmly lodged in the domestic. It's firmly lodged actually in the slightly sort of uptight, scaldy settings of a children's book. School rooms and tea and going out for walks. And in the 100 years of the novel to that point, I suppose it's psychological violence you're describing as much as physical violence. Yes. So the psychological violence comes from the Gothic novels. Okay, so that has been in the novel beforehand. Radcliffe, the Castle of Otranto, the Mysteries of Udolpho, that kind of stuff. But you're saying what's new in Jane Eyre is bringing that into a realist domestic space. Yes, exactly. So I think what's been interesting about the Gothic novel in the late 18th century, those examples that I just cited, is that they imagine ghosts and hauntings and all sorts of things, but almost always it turns out that there's a very rational, ordinary explanation for what they're seeing. And Bronte's genius is to kind of turn that around. And what Bronte's telling us as the readers is that this is the Gothic writ large, that there actually is a kind of profound terror. And in that sense, it sort of anticipates, I think, something like Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Yes, great book. And I wonder whether he deliberately did that. You mentioned in your intro that Jane Eyre shows us the evolution of a woman's soul from childhood to adulthood. And I've seen that said about Jane Eyre in other places as well. And it's true. Is that a new thing? I'm not aware of whether that's new or not, Sophie, and I presume you are. I think it might be the first version that we really get of that idea. I mean, if you think, for example, about Pride and Prejudice, which is always my sort of ground zero novel, where we do have the sense that Elizabeth and Darcy are meant to be with one another, often really complicates that idea right from the start. They're actually not soul mates. They hate each other. They don't get together until Elizabeth sees that Mr. Darcy's house is really enormous and kind of awesome. Quite a game changer, that, isn't it? Yes, that's a big one. I mean, if you see somebody's house and it's big and awesome, you know, that's... You're going to change your mind. Yes. To be mistress of Pemberley might be something. There's not that move in Jane Eyre at all. There is this sense that their souls are reaching out to one another across class, across gender, across all sorts of social taboos, including the taboo that Mr. Rochester's got someone living in his attic, although, of course, Jane doesn't know that. There's an unstoppable sense of connection between them, and that gets kind of literalized at the end of the book when Jane hears Mr. Rochester calling to her. Jane, Jane, Jane. Jane, as he's burning to a crisp in his large house. I hadn't really thought about this before, but it exactly inverts that Pemberley thing from Jane Austen. Elizabeth doubles down on Mr. Dorsey when she sees Pemberley. Jane doubles down on Mr. Rochester when his house burns down. Yes. In fact, the house is the obstacle. Once the house is burnt down, they can finally be together. Yes, not just because his first wife's out of the way. Yes. But there's something about the house that's an impediment to their union. So that's an inversion. And also something that really struck me reading it is she proposes to him. Is that a first? Is this the first time a woman has taken that initiative and proposed to a man in literature? So that one I think it might be. It's not the first time there have been two proposal scenes in a novel. So Jane Eyre has two proposal scenes. The first one where Mr. Rochester proposes, and I want to come back to that in one second, and then there's this sort of redo after his house burns down. He's blind. He's maimed by his experiences in the fire. And Jane really takes power back from the man. So Rochester has dictated the terms of the first proposal, which was in a garden, and the garden is figured as being kind of like Eden. In the first proposal, which is on the grounds of Thornfield, Mr. Rochester's big house, the proposal is figured as a redo of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost or in the Bible for that matter. I mean, Rochester literally tells Jane that he feels like there's a string coming out of his rib and connecting to hers. It's an amazing image, that, isn't it? Yes. It's also quite awkward, isn't it? Very awkward. Going through married life with a string connecting you. Yes, your ribs together. Yeah, it'd be quite hard to go to the loo and stuff. It's a very unsexy thing to say to somebody when you're about to propose. Yeah, not hot at all. Yeah, there's a lot of not hot in that scene. She's going to make you like, shh, talk about the house more. Can I please see your last three tax returns? So the first version of the proposal, Mr. Rochester's completely in charge. It's like Eden. It's like a do-over of, let's say, Paradise Lost, and there's a string connecting them through their ribs. In the second version of the proposal, Jane herself is in charge. She has actually become independently wealthy by that point in the novel. Her husband-to-be has been crippled by a fire which was started by his ex-wife. A gutsy, daring piece of narrative maneuvering on Bronte's part. So Jane Eyre takes hold of things at the end of the novel. Okay, so there's nothing more annoying than having oneself quoted back at oneself. I saw you a few weeks ago at Sydney Writers' Festival giving a talk on the 18th century novel, and you said at the end of that, rather flippantly, but you meant it as well, that by the time Jane Austen has finished her, everything that the novel can do has been done. And so you're implying everything after there is a replay of things set in motion. So how do you feel about that now, having reread Jane Eyre? It is true that I made the claim at the Sydney Writers' Festival before I reread Jane Eyre. It is also true that I was ad-libbing in front of a large audience. Searching for provocative things to say. However, I'm actually going to stick to my guns. I think that Austen did all the major innovations that the novel ever needed, and we'll talk about that when we do our episodes on Jane Austen. But interestingly, Bronte is on record actually saying that she doesn't really read Jane Austen, she's not really interested in her. But she gets caught red-handed. There's a letter that she writes about Jane Austen, and she describes Austen as 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 Bonnie Beck. Which is a great quote. It is. Bronte, she rips down the fences and she pulls out the borders. She turns Austen's nicely manicured garden landscapes into a wild Yorkshire moor and mountainscape. And that's obviously what Bronte intends to take away from that remark. But she's also showing us what's so innovative about Austen, because Austen's novels, for all their careful fences and high cultivation, have the elements that Bronte needs. Yes, and she's also acknowledging, I guess, that Austen has set everything in place, put up the fences, and you can rip them, but they're still Austen's fences. Totally. I mean, to finish on the romantic side of Jane Eyre, which I think is a little bit of a departure from Austen's novels, the language of passion in Bronte is new. So, for example, when Rochester proposes to her in the rib scene, the garden scene, he says, my bride is here because my equal is here. Jane, will you marry me? And that's quite interesting and quite new. He's saying that they are equals because they're soulmates, even though they're completely divided by wealth and status and even education. And Jane says back to him, I have as much soul as you, as full as much heart. If God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. She says that when she has to head out because he's going to marry someone else. It's a really passionate cry. And the fact that Bronte is giving those heartfelt, very vulnerable raw words to a female character is hugely important. You don't hear those kinds of explicit protestations in Austen. I mean, a very passionate character in Austen would be Anne Elliot in Persuasion who feels that way about Frederick Wentworth or even Fanny Price in Mansfield Park who sort of feels that way about Edmund Bertram, but they wouldn't say it aloud. And Bronte goes the extra mile and has them say it. The other thing I'll just mention about Mr. Rochester and the language of romance is that he in many ways adopts a sort of feminine position. I mean, unlike an Austen hero, Mr. Rochester is extremely emotional. There's a moment when Jane has to head out because she realises that he's already married. And Mr. Rochester flings himself onto a sofa and bursts into uncontrollable sobs and says, oh, Jane, my hope, my love, my life. You know, that's not how a Victorian gentleman is supposed to speak. No, and his whole strategy is very unmanly in the Victorian sense. He's playing hard to get. He goes through a very elaborate process of pretending to be in love with someone else to make Jane jealous. I mean, it's so convoluted. And it's not the Victorian male striding out with determination to seize the woman he loves. It's not purposeful. It's coquettish, one might say. He is a Victorian coquette. No, I love that, actually. It's true. Jonty, you've been looking at Bronte's life, which both mirrors and departs from Jane Eyre. How does Bronte get to Jane Eyre? Okay, the story of the Brontes is so fascinating. Jane Eyre is not, of course, an autobiography, but it does track alongside Charlotte Bronte's life in many fascinating ways, and it has many autobiographical elements as well. And interestingly, when it was published, she had called it Jane Eyre, a novel, and the publisher said, why don't you call this Jane Eyre, an autobiography edited by? And Charlotte Bronte accepts this. She decides to go through it, and I think one of the reasons why she does decide to go through it is that, in her heart, she doesn't believe it's that deceitful to claim it's autobiographical. That's interesting. She's also picking up on something about 18th century novels, which is they often claim to be the true story of the character's life. But I think what you're saying, which is interesting, is that in the case of Jane Eyre, it really is pretty autobiographical. I mean, the starting point of Jane Eyre is that Jane Eyre is an orphan. Charlotte Bronte is not an orphan, but she has lost her mother very, very young. So just to roll back, her father, Patrick Pronte, he was called, he was a… So Bronte is a kind of face saver. Yes. It's a rebrand. He comes from a poor Irish family, and he's an intellectual prodigy, and is spotted and eventually ends up in Cambridge. And through a series of manoeuvres, he shifts his name. So Patrick Pronte, which I think he knows is not a name that's going to lead to any greatness. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. He changes it to Bronte, and then finally he settles on Bronte. And the reason why he chooses Bronte is that Lord Nelson, after I think Battle of the Nile, was awarded an estate on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, and it's called the Bronte Estate. So he changes his name to this very heroic title. It's probably now an eco-tourismo boutique wine hotel. Biographers make a great deal of the fact that apparently Bronte in Greek means thunder. How else could the Bronte girls, Charlotte and Emily, be? Their very name is thunder. Brilliant. So he changes his name to Bronte, and he becomes curate of a very small village in the Yorkshire moors. It's very windswept and moorish. He's a writer of Wuthering Heights, will know the landscape. Listeners to Kate Bush. Listeners to Kate Bush, yes. House on the Wild and Windy Moors. He's a curate. He writes poetry. He is, by all accounts, an eccentric man with his own strain of violence. There are stories that when he gets in a rage, he would march outside and fire his pistols off into the back garden to release his temper and anger. There are a lot. Yes, they're probably a poxful. Really? Amazing. He marries a woman called Maria, and they have six children together. Five girls, one boy. But then when Charlotte is only five, comes the first great traumatic event in her life, which is her mother dies, and not in a neat 21st century way. It's a very drawn-out Victorian death. It takes her eight months to die, in which she's removing herself from her children. So the children are increasingly cut off over eight months. How incredibly sad. The children, very young, Charlotte's five, all the others, they're all born a year apart. They are, from this moment, thrown upon one another for support and comfort. And there's a story recalled by their nurse later in life, remember them straggling about the moors together as a group led by the eldest one, who was also called Maria, age seven. It does raise the question what the nurse was doing. I mean, surely your role as a nurse is to nurse the children, not sit around watching them straggling on the moors, commenting on how sad it is they're straggling about on the moors without a guardian. Yeah, good catch, they say. So something needs to be done with the children, and Patrick decides to send the eldest girls to the Clergy Daughters School in Cowan Bridge. It's a new school for daughters of poor clergymen. Right. Doesn't sound very fun. It's not, and it is absolutely verbatim the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre, which provides those harrowing early chapters of the book. Oh, yeah, that's really grim. And I mentioned that when Jane Eyre was published, her publisher asked her to call it an autobiography. Interestingly, they also suggested that she toned down this section of the book, that it was too grim, and she refused, saying that it's true. And also probably, you know, there's a social impact side to Charlotte Bronte too, isn't there? She wants the world to know what these sorts of institutions and these sorts of experiences are like. She's got an activist streak. Yes, and Dickens is doing Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist around the same time, of course, as well. So there is a moment where these writers are exposing the absolute awfulness of the educational system, particularly for poorer children. Cowan Bridge is run by a ghastly evangelical philanthropist called William Cyrus Wilson, and he is the model for Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, who runs Lowood School. There's that early scene, isn't there, where Mr Brocklehurst is summoned by Jane Eyre's guardian, Mrs Reed, because she wants to get Jane off her hands. Mrs Reed is the mean stepmother type figure, although she's Jane's aunt by marriage. And we know straight away that Jane's time at Lowood is going to be absolutely miserable. There's this iron-in-the-heart moment where Mr Brocklehurst says to this tiny child, Jane Eyre, he says, I have a little boy younger than you who knows six psalms by heart, and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread nut to eat or a verse of a psalm to learn, he says, oh, the verse of a psalm, angels sing psalms, says he. I wish to be a little angel here below. He then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety. Psalms are not interesting, I remarked. It's a great response by Jane. And the real Mr Brocklehurst, William Cyrus Wilson, he published a magazine called The Children's Friend, which is anything but a friend to children. It's full of cautionary tales in which God strikes a child dead mid-tantrum, and a girl applauds the teachers for whipping them, crying, it is because they love us. God would be angry with them if they did not whip us. So this is grim, grim Victorian moralizing, and he writes a book called A Child's First Tales, where the stories are called things like Mother Dead and Dead Boy. I'm wondering if there's space in the YA market or the middle school reading market to bring some of this stuff back. How would it go? Yes, I think Dead Boy is right for readers. Probably right by the guy who wrote the Demon Dentist series. Interestingly, we were talking a while back about Alice in Wonderland, and it's precisely this sort of dreadful moralizing children's stories that Lewis Carroll is reacting against when he writes and publishes Alice in Wonderland. Yes, you're right. What do you think Bronte's attitude to it is? Does she think childhood has a moral, or do you think she has quite an amoral vision of childhood? So interesting, isn't it? She throws in later in the novel, of course, the character of St. John. St. John turns out to be her long-lost cousin, who is a very, very evangelical preacher who's going off to be a missionary. A massively uptight missionary. Charles, or Jane at least, is on his side to a degree. Yes, the correction of childhood. Childhood is a moment to lay down a moral map. And that comes up in the Lowood school sections too. You know, Helen Burns is an extremely moral child, but we'll come to Helen too in a moment. You're telling us about Cow and Bridge, the real-life Lowood, and presumably they didn't get much to eat. No, William Cyrus Wilson seems to spend far too much time writing stories like Mother Dead to be paying attention to the quality of the school. Well, who can blame him? In that 19th century spirit, he believes a school, especially a school for semi-impoverished young girls, should be a Spartan place. It should be cold, there shouldn't be enough food, the children should be outdoors most of the time. And there are those bits in Jane Eyre about Lowood School which could only have been written by somebody who went to such an institution. I'm thinking of that image where Jane describes the perpetual coldness and the way that the larger, older girls would hog the bench in front of the one fire. And she talks about the smaller girls, the younger girls at the back, wrapping their starved arms inside their pinafores. And that's written by somebody who spent a lot of their childhood wrapping her arms inside her pinafores. Inside her clothes. And it's easy, I suppose, for us now to dismiss that as the clichés of Victorian literature, the waist-like children and the physical discomfort and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But actually to think about what those places must have been like is heartbreaking. Really cold. And nowhere near enough to wear. I mean, I was a bit chilly this morning and we had the heating on. Yeah, and no accountability. So you have a complete maniac like William Cyrus Wilson who is just a god deciding the lives and fates of these young girls. He, in effect, is one of the many child abusers in this novel. What's about to happen is the second great trauma in Charlotte's life. Because the girls at Caron Bridge School are all essentially malnourished, they're cold, their immune systems are low, is that disease rips through the school just as it does in Lowood School in Jane Eyre. And when Charlotte is nine, her two older sisters at the school, Maria, named after their mother, and Elizabeth, become very sick like a number of the other girls and they die within a few weeks of one another. It's another moment of great trauma for the Bronte household to lose the two elder daughters within a couple of weeks. And Charlotte turns this experience into the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Helen Burns, who you're not such a big fan of. Well, now I feel bad. Now you've set it up. You've set me up, Jonty. Yes, when I reread it, I did think she landed on a bit thick. Helen is a massive goody-two-shoes. She's grateful for her abuse. She's grateful for her discomfort. And I did think, oh, come on. But what I now realize is that Bronte is asking her readers, just as Dickens was, to properly inhabit this terrible social wrong that was going on and to try to do something about it. There's a kind of moral fervor to it. That actually makes me rethink my reading. The night when Helen dies, when Jane creeps down to her room. Oh, it's so sad. Helen dies in her arms. Yes, she cradles her in her arms. And I was tempted to be cynical about that and think that there was a little bit of Victorian melodrama or child eroticism, which is another strain in Victorian literature. But perhaps it's a deep expression of grief and sympathy on Jane's part for her lost sisters, wishing that she could cradle them in her arms. Charlotte's part, you mean. I do mean Charlotte, yes. So in the book, Charlotte has Jane Eyre at Lowood for eight years. Yes, but Charlotte herself gets out of Cowan Bridge. Her father pulls her out, not surprisingly, having lost two of his daughters to it. And she spends the next eight years mostly homeschooling, although sometimes attending other schools. And this is where that incredibly tight bond between the children is strengthened Charlotte's Branwell, who's the son. Emily and Anne, they're reading at home. They're studying art. They're reading Gulliver's Travels. Yes, we love Gulliver's Travels. They love the romantics. They have access to Byron. Probably Childe Harold or Don Jewin, do you think? Well, I don't know which it would be. Probably Childe Harold. Probably Childe Harold. So they're getting that love of big emotions from the romantic poets. And they also start to develop their own imaginative worlds. Well, that's very Gulliver's Travels, isn't it? So we did an episode on Gulliver's Travels and we talked about the weirdness of Jonathan Swift inventing these imagined worlds. Now I'm thinking about the impact of Gulliver's Travels on Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre herself has that slight quality of not being able to say the thing which she's not. She's incredibly direct. She's like a Wynnum. She's like a Wynnum, yes, from Gulliver. But also just the business of imaginative worlds and make-up lands. That's very Swift. Yes, and it starts when Branwell decides to share his toy soldiers. He turns them into communal toys for all his siblings to play with. And they play act with them as famous real heroes like Wellington and Bonaparte. They cast themselves like the gods in Homer. And these stories increasingly become fantastical and separate from reality and real characters. They have characters called the Duke of Zamorna who's Duke of a country called Angria. There are places called Glass Town, Birdopolis. They make maps of this world they're creating. And we know all about it because they write these tiny books, essentially for the toys at start. But in the end, they're just writing them for themselves, these books full of stories of these imaginary characters having their adventures. And I think you mentioned to me that one of the imaginary places was called Northangerland. Now, that's got to be a reference to Jane Austen, hasn't it, to Northanger Abbey. It makes me think about the way in which already Jane Austen's spoof on the Gothic novel was going through Charlotte and the Bronte's minds. Yes, that Gothic tone is in there. And these male heroes, they are very Byronic figures. And there are a lot of Gothic elements as well to the stories. So you're quite right about that. I want to pull us into Jane Eyre for a second because Charlotte at this time of her life is presumably becoming aware of what's going to be a dominant theme of Jane Eyre, that the rigidity of Victorian society can't accommodate the complexity of a woman's soul. This has to be dawning on her not just during the Cowan Bridge years but in the years afterwards. We're told that Jane Eyre is quietness itself until she turns 10, and then she breaks out all fire and violence. That's when the Red Room episode happens. We're not told exactly why this happens, but presumably it's inspired by some sense of recognition on Jane's part that society has marked out for her a pretty terrible role. You know, she's been dealt a crap hand. She's an orphan girl without any physical charms. And it's part of the psychological astuteness of Bronte's novel, actually, that this is happening at the age of 10. I mean, my kids started getting quite sort of grumpy and bulgy when they were about 10. So we had to put them in the Red Room. Right. Did you? Yes. So Bronte's thinking through... Did you send them to Cowan Bridge School? We would have if we could have. We did let them have meat, though. Maybe that was a mistake. Anyway, so Bronte's thinking through the developmental stages, not just of childhood but also of adolescence. And there's that wonderful scene when the 10-year-old Jane tells Mrs. Reid exactly what she thinks of her. And these are words that it was very taboo for a child, a female character to use, let alone in a novel. She tells Mrs. Reid that she's bad, that she's hard-hearted, that she's deceitful. It's wonderful. And there's this amazing passage. Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. Mrs. Reid looked frightened. Her work had slipped from her knee. She was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, even twisting her face as if she would cry. I mean, that's an amazing imaginative experiment on Bronte's part that a child has that kind of power. I know, because normally in Victorian novels, children go through all sorts of injustices, and when you're reading them, you're like, for God's sake, say something, tell them what you really think. Yes, and Jane absolutely does. She does. You get the fantasy fulfilment where she tells these characters exactly what the reader feels about them. Yes, and other characters in the novel don't pull their punches either. The servants, for example, in Gateshead, which is the house that Jane lives in as a little child, she overhears a maid saying, if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her for lawnness, but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that. I think this is another moment of Jane being avatar for Charlotte Bronte as well, because if you're Charlotte Bronte wondering what you're going to do with your life when you grow up, in Victorian society there aren't many options open for you, as we know. Your best hope is to marry well. All the evidence is that Charlotte knew from a very young age that she wasn't a beauty by her own accounts than others. She's very, very small. She has terrible eyesight. She's missing some teeth. And the family hasn't got much money, so she hasn't got much hope in making a favourable match, and that's why she's starting to wonder, what am I going to do with my life? Society has so few options for women. So, like Jane Eyre, who after eight years becomes a teacher at the school, Charlotte likewise, at the age of 19, goes and becomes a teacher at Rowhead School, and she hates being a teacher. She just fills her tiny little books with stories of birdopolis that she sends back to her brother, Granwell. Oh, so they're still doing it. They're still doing it, and it's evolved into this vast Lord of the Rings-style fantasy. Yeah, there's a bit of Tolkien about it, doesn't there? There is a bit of it. Yeah, Middle-earth. And Charlotte writes about the experience. In one of her diaries, she's supposed to be teaching, and she writes, I long to write the spirit of all the birdopolis, of all the mountainous north, of all the woodland west, of all the river-watered east... This is the world she's created. ..came crowding into my mind. So gnarlier. An adult came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited. The thought came over me. Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oaths? She's talking about her students. Wow. That's amazing. I have a colleague who I teach with describes the walk from your office to the classroom as the walk of death. And I feel like Charlotte Bronte is talking about the walk of death. I thought I should have vomited. So she hates children. She obviously hates teaching. She hates fat people. Have you noticed that? No. A very unlikable cousin in the early parts of... John Reed. John Reed. He has thick lips. That's how we know that he's a bad man. And an awkward, sort of lumpish body. I think the other thing about, at least Charlotte, about the other Bronte sisters is that she was a bit of a bore, I think, John T. I don't think she was great company. There's this amazing story about William Makepeace Thackeray, the man who wrote Vanity Fair, who was a big name in Victorian letters. She actually dedicates the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray. And he has a dinner party for her when she finally comes to London after Jane Eyre's been this massive success and she's the toast of the town. She comes to the dinner and apparently she's so dull, she's so awkward conversationally and all the guests are just so desperate that Thackeray actually sort of sneaks out a side door and presses his finger to his lips in the corridor and puts his hat on and heads out to his club because he just can't take the rest of the evening with his celebrity guest, Charlotte Bronte. Yeah, she's a great moaner. She's incapable of looking at the bright side of anything. Yeah, but I feel a bit sorry for her being so physically awkward and physically unfortunate. Apparently when she was famous, she was having a portrait done and she felt incredibly self-conscious about having bad hair, very thin, sort of weak hair. She had a bad hair day. I think she had a bad hair life, actually. And so she splashed out on a hairpiece, basically a sort of Victorian hair extension and she showed up for the sitting with this thing on her head. Like a sort of curled ferret on her. Like a ferret. Like a ferret. But she had her bonnet on. Apparently when she took her bonnet off, finally the portrait just sort of sprang back in horror. Oh, no. What is this thing on her head? Oh, that's very sad. Poor Charlotte. I know. And so she's at Rowhead School and she basically has a nervous breakdown. And so she's 19, she's back at home and really starting to worry about what she's going to do with her life. She does actually get one marriage proposal around this time. But it's not a marriage proposal anyone wants. Why not? What's wrong with it? Well, the brother of a friend of hers has become a priest in Sussex and he wants a wife in the way that all young Church of England priests do. And he just sits and works his way through his sister's friends and is turned down by them. And so there is a diary entry in which he writes, on Tuesday last received a decisive reply from M.A.L.'s papa. A loss, but I trust a providential one. So he's been turned down. And then he just adds in his diary, wrote to a York friend, C.B., which is Charlotte Bronte. And then she's like number six. Yes, there is no passion. He's working his way through a list. He's got to Charlotte. Not even first choice. That has to be where Bronte got the scenes at the end of Jane Eyre from, with the very uptight, very stiff St. John River's proposal to Jane, where he basically says, I don't love you at all, but would you accompany me to a mission in India? Because it's unsuitable for a man of God to appear without a wife. She sort of says, I'll go, but I'm just going to go on my own terms. I'll be your friend. And he, no, no, we must be married. He has a kind of evangelical mania. But this young curate, who is the brother of a friend of hers, there's something just very wonderfully Church of England and half-hearted about it. Yes, you're absolutely right. Yeah, phoning it in. Well, of course, you're giving me, you've laid yourself wide open, John. Once again, you've given me a chance to hijack the episode with some intellectual history of religion. Oh, God, are we going to get a digression on the history of the Reformation? Well, I can't quite get to the Reformation, but I will say that St. John's Christianity, yes, it's got that sort of puritanical Calvinist streak, doesn't it? It's not mainstream Church of England. He really, he burns to convert. That's not what you're supposed to be doing in the Church of England. I feel I'm going to need to give you at some point just a podcast extra to do, and it can just be you on your own for like eight hours just saying everything you want to say about religion. Oh, I'm actually salivating as you say that. It would be so exciting. I find religious history unbelievably interesting. Yes, you've never said it so outright, and I'm glad of your honesty because it's crept into our very conversations. I'm not a believer, but I find religious history incredibly interesting. Charlotte replies to this curious. What did she say? She says, I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you, but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. Oh, that's brilliant. It's a very good response. I think I'm going to put that into my auto reply. I have no personal repugnance to. Yes, mine is not the sort of disposition. I'm definitely going to use that. There's a lot of Jane Eyre in that, and Jane generally is very dubious about marriage, and I think that reflects a prevailing and really very important attitude among women in the 18th and 19th centuries, which is that marriage was a form of servitude. It was a kind of confinement and repression, and Jane Eyre sensibly really doesn't think that it's for her, and then she falls in love. She falls madly and unexpectedly in love with her boss, Mr. Rochester. And there's a scene in Jane Eyre where Mr. Rochester, in one of his sort of classic gaslighting moments, dresses up as a fortune teller, a kind of gypsy figure. And he shows up and he comes here and he's wearing a hood and like an apron and talking in a high voice and stuff. Yes, this is back to the Cockettish Mr. Rochester. The Cockettish Mr., right. Yes, he cross-dresses. He puts on women's clothes and he sits in his library and calls the women guests in the household in one by one and tells their fortune. And this is all apropos. Jane herself being quite resistant to marriage and not wanting to fall into the trap of that Victorian marriage plot, basically. Mr. Rochester, as the fortune teller, says, What tales do you like best to hear? And Jane Eyre says, So marriage is catastrophe. The marriage plot is a catastrophe. And so it turns out to be, in fact, in Jane Eyre as well. And then it's Jane herself who corrects it, who fixes it. What to me really stood out as I reread Jane Eyre this time is how from the very start of her life, Jane seizes control of things. She's not a passive heroine at all. She refuses to be a textbook orphan. As we've seen, she tells Mrs. Reid exactly what she thinks of her and that that's very liberating. She becomes a teacher at Lowood Hall, which in a way is a conformity to expectation. But she quickly gets sick of it and she's actually very proactive and entrepreneurial. She places a job ad. She gets herself organized. She hustles. She's like an air tasker or an Uber driver. She's got the apps going, hasn't she? She's definitely got the apps going. She leans in, doesn't she? And there's that famous passage in Jane Eyre, which I thought might be good to read here, which acts as a sort of manifesto both for Jane's and I assume Charlotte's way of thinking. So she says, There's nothing wrong with puddings, by the way. Or knitting. I think she should have left puddings out. It's a great passage, but it's like, don't knock puddings, shall we? Yeah. Yeah, I like a pudding. I had a big knitting phase, actually. Did you knit stockings? Not stockings, because they got a very tricky bit to knit the toe. Did you play the piano? I did. I like the embroidery bag. It's quite new agey, isn't it? Yeah, that is new age. So you've been talking about Jane hustling, and to come back to Charlotte, she's ended up back home. She's had her breakdown at Rowhead School. She's had this appalling marriage proposal. She knows not that. And so she then hustles herself. She and Branwell, her brother, they decide to write to two of the most famous writers in Britain at the time, asking to help with their writing careers. It's pretty ballsy. Charlotte writes to the poet laureate, Sothe, and Branwell writes to Wordsworth. And Sothe actually replies to his credits, although what he replies is dispiriting. She sends him some poems. And he says she's got talent, but she shouldn't waste too much time on it. He says literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. Oh, Sothe. Yeah, wow. I thought he was friends with Coleridge. Well, he was, but all the romantic poets became very conservative the older they got. Yeah, and they weren't good with their women, were they? They were better when they died young. So that's a knockback. And so Charlotte decides, just as Jane does, that she's going to have to be a governess, but the poet laureate has told me not to waste my time writing. Yes, that's like Dryden telling Swift that he's never going to make a poet. They both had the last laugh, didn't they? They did. Charlotte Bronte v. Robert Sothe. Yes. And she's not going to marry Mr. Priest in Sussex, who's worked his way down to her on a long list. No way. Isn't it the case that Charlotte actually ends up sort of marrying someone at the very end of her life and embroidering bags and making tea and having a pretty ordinary domestic existence? Well, she ends up very happy. Oh, happy. Right, that's the word. Yes. She finds her true purpose, which is embroidering bags. And making pudding. Yes, and regrets all the things she said earlier in her career about this mortalized pudding. It's only funny I hadn't wasted my time on Jane Eyre. I know. I do quite want to come back and do Valette and look at the last bit of Charlotte Bronte's life after everyone's died, because she is happy for a couple of years. And no bloody wonder. I mean, those Brontes, they would have been tough to live with, wouldn't they? Pretty tough. So she becomes a governess, just like Jane, and Charlotte goes to work for the Sidgwick family in nearby Loversdale. A seven-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. She quickly realizes that she hates being a governess almost as much as being a teacher, and she rails against the loss of mental liberty. And she writes to her sister, Emily, I see now more clearly than I've ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill. While she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. If she steals a moment for herself, she is a nuisance. So Jane Eyre experiences that same restlessness when she becomes the governess of the quite charmless Adele at Thornfield Hall. Jane is very aware of the strange interstitial life that she has as a governess. She's neither a regular servant in the household nor is she a member of the family. Governesses don't have a place, basically, in Victorian society. And in the same way I think that the scenes at Lowood Hall could only have been written by someone who's experienced the institution of a Victorian boarding school for the impoverished children of clergymen, so too the scenes of the governess's life at Thornfield could really only have been written by someone who'd experienced it firsthand. Do you remember that scene where Jane is invited to join a party of houseguests after dinner and she has to wait for the women in the drawing room? It's a very interesting scene describing that sort of interstitial social role in Victorian society that I think Bronte's carving out for Jane in a very purposeful way to show readers how few the options were for someone like that and how remarkable Jane is to get beyond the role that's assigned to her. Jane says, as the women come into the drawing room after dinner, There were but eight, yet somehow as they flocked in, they gave the impression of a much larger number. Some were very tall, many were dressed in white. I rose and curtsied to them. One or two bent their heads. In return, the others only stared at me. They dispersed about the room, reminding me, by the lightness and buoyancy of their movements, of a flock of white, plumy birds. I love that passage. You talked earlier about Charlotte Bronte ripping up the fence and garden of Jane Austen. Yes. I feel in that passage, Jane is observing a scene from Jane Austen, but she's the outsider looking in. Yes, that's great. She's switching the point of view from a Jane Austen story to the servant in the room watching. Yes, you're absolutely right, which you don't get in Austen, do you? You do get those conversation pieces. You do get those tableaus in which multiple women being in the same room are vying with one another or playing their position off each other to get power in a social world, but we don't see the servant's point of view. That's very Downton Abbey. Charlotte doesn't last long as a governess either. Having had a nervous breakdown in her teaching job, after a few months, she decides she can't bear being a governess. She can't bear being away from her sisters, can't bear to be away from the parsonage. Emily and Anne are also struggling. They're likewise trying to do these jobs as governesses, as teachers, and finding they just can't do it. Right. Branwell, who was the great hope of the family, the only son, is proving himself a complete dud. So he's decided to become a painter, which isn't helpful to anyone. No, that's not a good idea. And sets himself up as a painter in Bradford, which fails. Right, yes. He becomes a tutor. He's sacked from his first job for some misdemeanor that nobody knows. And he finally finds work as a station clerk on the Leeds to Manchester railway line. He's already, by this point, an alcoholic, an opium addict. So he's a drug addict as well. Charlotte is realizing what all the Bronte children are realizing, that once they're separated from one another, separated from the parsonage, they are incapable of thriving. They always come back. And Charlotte writes about this at one point. She talks in a letter about, my home, the parsonage, is humble and unattractive to strangers. But to me, it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world, the profound and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mold, their ideas drawn from the same source, when they have clung to each other from childhood, and when family disputes have never sprung up to divide them. How many siblings would really say that about one another? Very few. The siblings in Jane Eyre don't get along particularly well, do they? The Reeds are at odds with one another. Adele's an only child. There's the boarding school, but we don't really have a sense of families of children. So it's obviously a very sacred space for the Brontes. I mean, I suppose what it was like a kind of writer's workshop. That was where they were able to be creative. And they probably didn't get much feedback on their work elsewhere. Yeah. And Charlotte realizes that they need to do something because there's not enough income coming into the family. And her plan is that they will open a girls' school at the Parsonage. They will take in students. The Bronte sisters will be the teachers. And to do that, they need to finish their own education and get teaching diplomas. Oh, interesting. But they were quite well-educated, weren't they, the Brontes? Well, yeah, a lot of it was home education. They need their internet diploma. Yeah. Their micro-credential. They need their micro-credential to start the school. So she comes up with a plan that she and Emily should go to a finishing school in Brussels, of all places. And Patrick, their father, agrees. It's an investment. Yeah, it would have been quite expensive, wouldn't it? He'll pay the money. That's what's going to enable them to start the school. And so Charlotte and Emily go to the continent and they go to Brussels. Wow, okay. So I didn't really realize that, although I should have because of reading Valette. So, I mean, because we think of the Brontes as the pin-up writers for the Yorkshire Moors. We think of those novels as really belonging to that landscape and very remote and isolated. And we forget that Charlotte and Emily had spent time on the continent and that Jane Eyre itself contains a very big world. Jane speaks what I think is really good French. Mr. Rochester has lived in France for a longer period of time. The Rivers sisters, at the end of the book, Singen sisters, speak really good German. Mr. Rochester has been all over the place. He's lived in the West Indies. What seems like a very local rural book actually contains within it lots of evidence of travel and cultivation. It also contains within it a lot of evidence of big patterns of migration and major world events politically that were happening off stage. It's quite a cosmopolitan book. Yes, more cosmopolitan than people realize. So how was Brussels? Did they have a good time? Well, we're going to need to wrap up this episode. I'm not going to try and claim Brussels is in itself a cliffhanger. Yes, I was going to say you're going to try and get a cliffhanger out of Brussels. It's not like come back for the next episode to hear about Brussels. But the cliffhanger is that while in Brussels something happened, which is Charlotte falls desperately in love with a man who is in part the model for the other character who sits at the heart of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester. And on that cliffhanger... Oh, I can't wait. That's a cliffhanger. We're going to be getting into the love story at the heart of Jane Eyre in the next episode and the unrequited version of that in Charlotte's own life. You've been listening to The Secret Life of Box. Oh, yeah.