33. Jane Eyre: The Best Brontë Novel?

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2:17Just then it seemed my chamber door was touched, as if fingers had swept the panels and groping away along the dark gallery outside. I said, who was there? Nothing answered. I was chilled with fear. This was a demonic laugh, low, suppressed and deep, uttered as it seemed at the very keyhole of my chamber door. I thought at first the goblin laughter stood at my bedside or rather crouched by my pillow. But I rose, looked round and could see nothing while as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated. Something gurgled and moaned I hurried on my frock and shawl I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand There was a candle burning just outside And on the matting in the gallery I was surprised at this circumstance But still more was I amazed To perceive the air quite dim As if filled with smoke And while looking to the right hand and left To find whence these blue wreaths issued I became further aware of a strong smell of burning Something creaked It was a door ajar, and that door was Mr Rochester's, and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence.

3:25Tongues of flame darted round the bed. The curtains were on fire in the midst of blaze and vapour. Mr Rochester lay stretched, motionless in deep sleep. Wake, wake!

3:36Dominic Sandbrook: I cried. In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre? What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who is in the room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me? Well, hello everybody. So that was 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 Curra Bell. 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.

4:18Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Betraying My Hand Right at the Beginning. That's a hot take out the gates. Well, it's not a controversial take.

4:53Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

5:27Dominic Sandbrook: 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. So Tabby, I've already betrayed my hand and said how good I think this book is.

6:06Dominic Sandbrook: 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. it. 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.

6:40So 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, Jane Eyre is written in the early Victorian era, but it's actually set in the earlier period. It's looking back.

6:52Dominic Sandbrook: Like 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. Reid, 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.

7:31Dominic Sandbrook: 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 was 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 as you will have already noticed from that opening reading, strange things happen here.

8:04Footsteps at night, laughter in the shadows, fires, no one knows why.

8:09Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Lowoods. 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. I mean, when we 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.

8:42Dominic Sandbrook: 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. you know blanche yeah completely she's very caroline bingley from pride and prejudice if anyone has read that and her milia there are a group there are 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 of the local area they totally are they love polzeth totally they are massively gilet and quarter zip wearing anyway they turn up jane is very worried that mr rochester is going to marry blanche there's a great twist here.

9:36Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Blanchine groom 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.

10:08Dominic Sandbrook: 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 react 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.

10:46It'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 at the back says yes. 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, that holds herself together. And Mr. Rochester begs her to remain.

11:20Dominic Sandbrook: 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 discover 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.

11:53And then Sinjin 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.

12:30And 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 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, you know, how they are overly mythologized, they are unusually dogged by tragedy, wouldn't you say?

12:56Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

13:31Dominic Sandbrook: And when she's four, they move to a parsonage at Howarth on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. 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.

14:07Starting schools was not something I would have been capable of. So that's quite something.

14:11Dominic Sandbrook: 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 yeah so the Brontes they're 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.

15:03Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Balliol Dynamos football team and she just will not listen.

16:01What was it? The Balliol Dynamos? 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?

16:15Dominic Sandbrook: 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. You cut up the oranges for half time. 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.

16:51Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

17:19They're all writing. And they come up with these imaginary worlds and they make up these stories. There's Gondol, Glass Town, Angria. 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.

17:52And this is Charlotte's mother and she dies when Charlotte is only five years old.

17:56Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Karen Bridge. And Caron 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 reign of terror. The burnt porridge. Burnt porridge. So everybody who's read the Lowood 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.

18:33Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

19:04Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

19:38Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

20:13Dominic Sandbrook: 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 biographers, is people who have written about her, people that knew her, have been quite disparaging about her physical appearance.

20:52It'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.

21:09Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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. And also Elizabeth Gaskell is generous enough to mention the fact that she had lots of teeth missing.

21:45so that's kind close friend and biographer is with 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

22:11Dominic Sandbrook: when you describe that when you describe every particular do you know what 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 is certainly slightly based.

22:56And 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 infatuated with heger and we know this because we have surviving letters but this passion was entirely unrequited so claire harman 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'd barely had any experience of men in the real world outside of her father and her brother.

23:43And 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 is 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.

24:15Jane 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.

24:29Dominic Sandbrook: I'm going to use this love letter from this madwoman 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, Rocherton, there's a bit of him there. I think there's a bit of her, I mean, lots of biographers.

25:01Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

25:30Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Anne send all their stuff to London publishers under the assumed names Curra, 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. Their 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.

26:02Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly so. But the early years of um 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 actually has like a pneumonia or fever or something refuses a doctor dies has like the world's smallest coffin because she's quite possibly got an eating disorder then ann 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 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 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 period.

27:04Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Well, 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?

27:34Yeah, 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, marry they did in June of that year. Patrick didn't come to the wedding.

27:56Dominic Sandbrook: Nice, nice. In a strange turn of events, they 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.

28:30Yeah, exactly. Hardly matrimonial bliss there. But then, again, quite sweetly, Arthur grew on her because she wrote in a letter six months later that Arthur was a dear boy and he's 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.

29:01Charlotte 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.

29:14Dominic Sandbrook: 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 School, it's Thornfield Hall. It's the place where she meets Mr. Rochester. And that this is based on a real place. It's near Hathasage in Derbyshire.

29:44Dominic Sandbrook: This place, North Lees Hall, belonged to a family called the Ayres, or the Ayres 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 Lee's 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.

30:21Perhaps not entirely improbable, because his wife did call him Sortie Pat. Sortie Pat? Yeah.

30:27Dominic Sandbrook: What, so he's the rake in this? Well, I don't know, but I think he probably, you know, had a slightly more... Melodramatic side. Yeah, a 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 allusions. It's full of Milton is in there, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare is there, Byron.

30:57Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Jaina. 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.

31:33And 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.

32:01Dominic Sandbrook: John Buchan, The 39 Steps, 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 the five stops exactly so it's gateshead lowwood thornfield marsh end and then ultimately fern dean but i think one of the greatest influences on the on jane air 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 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 that as a child she's she's sort of locked up all the meaning different meanings that the Red Room might have.

33:45Dominic Sandbrook: 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 to harking back to the opening reading again, inexplicable occurrences. It's this thing where enchantment and fear coexist side by side in the figure of Jane as well.

34:22So it's undeniably a massive, massive part of Jane Eyre.

34:27Dominic Sandbrook: 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 and they're 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.

35:02Dominic Sandbrook: And she says, and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour 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 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 travellers As this horse was now coming upon me And this sort of sense, she has a fantastically rich imagination.

35:41Dominic Sandbrook: And 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 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 that it does, you're right, it elevates the book. And then there's also the romantic poets who Charlotte Bronte loved.

36:20So 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.

36:37Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

37:07And 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.

37:23Dominic Sandbrook: 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. The fact that it touches all these different things and it has this kind of it's ambiguously situated.

38:01Dominic Sandbrook: 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 wallpaper looks like and what they're eating for dinner. But behind that wallpaper, they're very well maybe fairies and ghouls and goblins and something more. I can see why this appeals to you, Tabby, because this is completely your... It's right up my street. Yeah. This is Tabitha Syrette, bingo. Exactly. So she's done it. How is it published? I mean, this is an interesting story.

38:31It is, actually.

38:32Dominic Sandbrook: 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 newbie has rejected the professor charlotte then works on jane air jane air 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 air will find that very familiar i think so smith rushes out jane air under the title jane air and autobiography and this is a classic kind of novelistic conceit to pretend that it's real and it's a real autobiography.

39:11Dominic Sandbrook: And they pretend that Curra Bell 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 it's so successful that Smith, Ellor 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 currabel who knows who currabel 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.

40:02Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

40:35Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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 actually, there's a funny little story about Thackeray. So 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.

41:06Dominic Sandbrook: Such a theme woman in white again so lots of speculation at the time about who wrote to it and Charlotte Brunty never admitted it. No and also she was unsettled and 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 modeled places and characters on real life and she didn't want the connection to be made perhaps rightly because Elizabeth Gaskell came into under a lot of fire later for saying that Brocklehurst was based on this guy called Reverend Carys Wilson. And then the people that liked Carys Wilson came back and they said that she had to retract what she'd said.

41:39But 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.

41:56Dominic Sandbrook: 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 condemnation. 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 defense 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 that other people were shocked by it I wonder if there was an element of Charlotte Bronte's nature where she cared a lot about what people thought of her.

42:50She 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.

43:01Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

43:32Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

44:05Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Jane Eyre 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.

44:39Dominic Sandbrook: Oh my God, it's so exciting. Huge.

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46:26Dominic Sandbrook: 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 governesses and to sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes. So the newsletter comes out every Saturday. There are all kinds of fun book recommendations, lots of deep dives into the authors and the books, and especially loads of insights from people who've listened to the show and telling us what they thought of the books, recommendations for further reading and so on. So this comes into your inbox every Saturday. It's totally free. And you can sign up at thebookclubhq.com.

47:00Dominic Sandbrook: And I absolutely promise we don't have another club or another newsletter hidden in the attic. This is the real thing. You will not be jilted at the altar. This is the elite circle, yeah. 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 passing to her most private revelations.

47:37But 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 inevitably personal and it was unusual in its acuity i mean it was almost original so robert mccrum 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 um on the show because he was he was huge 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.

48:22She'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.

48:32Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

49:06Dominic Sandbrook: 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 for whom the events are happening, but also a later Jane Eyre who is 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.

49:42But because you're so bought into her world and her life and the things that happen to her.

49:46Dominic Sandbrook: 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 in 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.

50:18Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Biggers of authority have no, they 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 i've 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 And determined to revolt, you know, is the essence of her personality.

51:12Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Mr. Rochester wants to give her a glow up, she doesn't like it.

51:48Dominic Sandbrook: She says, I want to be mean. I mean, what you got? What you got? Tell me, would you react like that? No. I mean, 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 was all chapped with a stylist about her clothes.

52:21Dominic Sandbrook: And then I said to the stylist, and where did my jumper come from? Yours was like Caramelin or whatever. 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-gild 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. Yeah. She's passionate. There are two sides to Jane Eyre, which, I mean, this is another, she's a complicated, she feels real. She feels three-dimensional because on the one hand, she's very calm, cool, rational, thoughtful, reflective.

53:01She 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.

53:10Dominic Sandbrook: 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, 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, Tappy.

53:37When I first read this when I was 12, this was a passage that I was literally drawn through and I memorised it.

53:42Dominic Sandbrook: Oh my God. You can do it from memory. Well, you're going to 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. 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 full 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.

54:17Dominic Sandbrook: 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?

54:48Dominic Sandbrook: 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 him and now we're 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 the that's played by clem fandango isn't it i'm absolutely not edgar linton just to be absolutely clear so mr rochester he's the sort of cousin of heathcliff from weathering 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.

55:52It's twilight.

55:54Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

56:37I don't think Rochester has to the same degree, though at the time the Coarsley Review warned that the generosity and honour of his character is almost like a trap. it means that it enchants lady readers to overlook how 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 humor 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 Lordy would never play Rochester.

57:15And he certainly would never play Rochester with a gold tooth and an earring. He's not that wild and untamed Rochester. You know, he's a much more sensible, good-natured person.

57:24Dominic Sandbrook: 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 can't 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?

58:08Dominic Sandbrook: No, they're not. And there's not the sensuality in Jane Austen, really, is there? I mean, that's the one thing that Charles de 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.

58:40Dominic Sandbrook: 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 there's an irony to that. And I love that. There is a slight hint of the sodomasochism 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. And, you know, she's saying, 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?

59:11Dominic Sandbrook: 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, St. John, 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.

59:48So 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 labor, 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 Wiz had proposed to me like that, not a chance would I have agreed.

1:00:29God 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.

1:00:40Dominic Sandbrook: 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 prioritise 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 to become 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 stinjan rivers and they are full of christian um 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.

1:01:52Dominic Sandbrook: Sinjin 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, you know, 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.

1:02:29Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

1:03:03Dominic Sandbrook: Fantastic, actually. I'd never thought of this. The 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 there, didn't they? They saw Jane Eyre as a product of revolutionary turmoil. You mentioned already, was it Elizabeth Rigby, is it, in the quarterly review?

1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook: 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, demonstrations, 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.

1:04:16Dominic Sandbrook: 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 industrialised world. So she says, am I an automaton and a machine without feeling?

1:04:51Can I bear to have my morse 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.

1:05:13Dominic Sandbrook: The Gillet people. Exactly. They sneer at her because she's a mere governess. She is, you know, not, 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.

1:05:50Dominic Sandbrook: Reid and she says, you know, she resists Mrs. Reid 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 backwards. She always claims equality with him.

1:06:23Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. She always does. Exactly. 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 eyeing 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's flesh.

1:07:02It 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.

1:07:13Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Rochdale, we spoke about how he tries 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 your equal. I already am. And it reflects what the kind of sentiments that Charlotte Bronte expressed in a lot of her letters, you know, saying that woman was too dependent on man, that woman was always going to be reduced if they didn't have cash at hand.

1:07:49And 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.

1:08:13Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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. A 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.

1:08:47Dominic Sandbrook: 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 that that's 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 raise 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.

1:09:34I 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 and snares 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 flashed.

1:10:05And 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

1:10:37Dominic Sandbrook: they're going to have to choose each other yeah that's a fair point actually because 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 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 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's 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 um 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.

1:12:17There needs to be a love rival. And I would say that Jane's is arguably one of the most formidable in all literature. So reveal the dark secret lurking in the attic of Jane Eyre.

1:12:28Dominic Sandbrook: 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 is 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.

1:13:15Hyena.

1:13:15Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, this description, when Jane first meets her. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not at first sight tell this creature. It groveled seemingly on all fours. It snatched and growled like some strange wild animal. But it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane. It hid its head and face. The clothed hyena rose up. She was a big woman in stature, almost equaling her husband and corpulent besides. She showed virile force in the contest more than once. She almost throttled him. So she's manly. She's big. She's animal. All of this kind of thing.

1:13:46She's called it at several points rather than her. She's so dehumanised that why would the reader feel any sympathy for her whatsoever?

1:13:54Dominic Sandbrook: 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 a, she's part of the kind of Creole elite on the Caribbean islands, on 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's 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.

1:14:32Dominic Sandbrook: 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 that you couldn't divorce someone for being insane hence people you know shipping their wives off to a Salem's 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 land? The infection of the colonies. You know, Imperial Gothic at this time is full of these kind of tropes.

1:15:15Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. So basically anticipating Dracula to some extent. Exactly. Yeah. So there's that. Or by contrast, Jane is the ultimate English heroine. She's an English rose. Everything about her belies Bertha'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.

1:15:57Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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.

1:16:46Rochester. i.e. Bertha is unredemptive in order to redeem Mr. Rochester. And that's Jane's purpose throughout the book.

1:16:53Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. The Creole novelist, Jean Rhys, 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.

1:17:35And you know what? It's such a good book because it actually manages to inhabit the 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.

1:17:58Dominic Sandbrook: Once you've read it 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. such 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 gonna give it 10 out of 10 uh 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?

1:19:20Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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 air 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 in the conversations about it will never end so yeah 10 out of 10 good good for you um i'm also going to give it 10 out 10.

1:20:11It'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 to make it readable, to combine all those genres and tropes in one piece of writing is just, it's an extraordinary achievement.

1:20:47I 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.

1:20:59Dominic Sandbrook: 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 not a league of its own. That's just for the sheer bounce 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 to sign up to our own beloved club of imprisoned lunatics and sign up to Book 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? Aren't we not agreed the newsletter's the best thing about it?

1:21:27I 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.

1:21:31Dominic Sandbrook: 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.

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