33. Jane Eyre: The Best Brontë Novel?

Why is Jane Eyre a romantic classic? Who was Charlotte Brontë? And, what social critiques lie in the heart of the novel? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Jane Eyre, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Caroline Kaye Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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  Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it?

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  You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite book so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for.

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• 2:42Speaker 00

  Just 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 is 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

• 3:25Speaker 00

  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. Tongues 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, I cried.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  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 beside you? Have you plotted to drown me?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  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 Curabell. It was enormously controversial when it was published. Some people, like the great novelist Thackeray, loved it. A lot of critics thought it was shocking, subversive, a challenge to the morality and to the principles of Victorian Britain. But it caused such a sensation, it accelerated the publication of Charlotte's sister Emily's book, Wuthering Heights. And of course, Wuthering Heights is the book with which, Tabby, we began this podcast.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  It's the original friend of the show.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  It is, exactly. So Jane Eyre, I think perhaps even more than Wuthering Heights, is seen as one of the canonical books, the towering heights of Victorian literature, indeed, perhaps all English literature. I think it's one of the best books in the English language. Betray my hand right at the beginning.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  That's a hot take out of the gates.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's not a controversial take. I think loads of critics would agree. It's one of the most intriguing, the most ambiguous, fascinating, endlessly readable books ever written. And so much to discuss in this episode. So the life of Charlotte Bronte and indeed the Bronte family, which we talked about a bit before with Wuthering Heights, but Charlotte's quite a different character from Emily.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  The origins of Jane Eyre, the publication of the book, then these two incredible characters. Jane herself, one of the most distinctive narrators in all fiction, and her love interest, her master, her friend, employer and her kind of sexual object, Mr Rochester. Mr Rochester, of course, has this dark secret in the shadows, which we have a hint of there in the introduction. And we'll be unravelling 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,

• 6:19Speaker 01

  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. What do you make of it?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  You said that it has this reputation for being possibly one of the great romances. So when I first read it, I was about, I don't know, 12, maybe. I remember, I was reading it in year eight. And I'd already fallen in love with Wuthering Heights, which I thought was so romantic and passionate. So I really liked Jane Eyre, but I didn't love it because I wasn't, I didn't think it was that romantic. I didn't find it as emotionally charged. That impression has totally transformed over the years. To betray myself as well, I think it is a work of absolute genius. We were talking before we did this episode about how and all we were of this book. So hopefully, over the course of the episode, people will come to see why we think that. But very briefly, let's get into the plot. So as you said, Jane Eyre is written in the early Victorian era, but it's actually set in an earlier period. It's looking back.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Like Wuthering Heights.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Like Wuthering Heights, exactly. You know, in that way, it's almost retro. Jane Eyre is an orphan. She's raised by her horrible aunt, Mrs Reed, and surrounded by cousins that hate her. And she's treated cruelly from a very young age. Then when she's 10, she is sent off to this awful puritanical school called Lowood, run by this hypocritical clergyman called Mr Brocklehurst. And I think this is a part of the book that so many people remember when they think of Jane Eyre, because the conditions are appalling. The girls are beaten, they have their hair chopped off. But it is there that Jane forms a very close friendship with a girl called Helen Burns, who's almost angelic in her goodness.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a martyr, saintly martyr, isn't she?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  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 have noticed from that opening reading, strange things happen here. Footsteps at night, laughter in the shadows, fires. No one knows why.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  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 Lowwoods. And then the heart of the book, it'll be, 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, we'll come back to this, about the different meanings of this.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, erotically charged.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Very erotically charged. And over time, she develops feelings for him, which she begins, I think, to admit to herself. She sort of struggles with them, but she's reasonably open with us, the readers, I think.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Well, she's remarkably self-knowing, Jane.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  She is, exactly. Now, Mr Rochester appears to have interests elsewhere. So there's a local beauty called Branche Ingram, as part of a sort of posh set that Mr Rochester associates with.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  She's such a pick-me girl, you know? She says all the things that she thinks the boys would like, you know?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Blanche, yeah, completely.

• 9:34Speaker 00

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

• 9:38Speaker 01

  And her milieu, they're a group, they're a load of people who, I mean, we're very familiar with in the show, Tabby. They're the red trouser brigade of the local, of the local area.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  They totally are. They love Pulsar.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Totally. They are massively gillain quarter zip wearing. Anyway, they turn up. Jane is very worried that Mr Rochester is going to marry Branche. There's a great twist here. There are also strange things that are happening. So for example, at one point, Mr Rochester has this mysterious guest to come and stay. And this guest overnight is attacked and bitten, isn't he? And Jane doesn't know why. Anyway, this is hanging there in the background. Mysterious goings on. A wonderful scene, actually. I think one of the great chapters in English literature, when basically Mr Rochester says to her, I've been messing with you. I've been, you know, I actually don't love this Branche Ingram at all and these red trouser people.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been playing hard to get.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's actually you that I love and I want to marry you. And it's a wonderful, wonderful scene, them walking in the gardens, one of the most beautifully written, I think, scenes in all English literature.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  It's meltingly romantic, actually, I think.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  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, they react slightly worries her. And we'll of course, discover why. Because when she turns up to marry him or on the wedding, the wedding day dawns.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Literally the wedding day. I mean, every bride's worst nightmare, as I can attest, you know, apart from maybe, apart from maybe turning up and saying that my groom is dressed as one of the creatures from Wind in the Willows.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  It's Mr Toad combing his hair.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But she gets to the altar and then, you know, that moment where it's like, does anyone object to this union? And then a voice in the back says, yes. And it turns out, shockingly, that Mr. Rochester is already married. Who is his wife? Well, we will not be revealing yet. We'll be revealing after the break. But suffice to say that she's one hell of a love rival. But after this, I mean, Jane is shattered. And I find this, there are these passages when she's sort of in her bedroom, paralysed by grief, that holds herself together, and Mr. Rochester begs her to remain.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  As his mistress.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Totally penniless, yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  She's begging for crusts of bread practically. She gets very, very ill, but she's taken in by the Rivers family. Sungin Rivers is the local curate. And she goes on to discover that they are, in fact, quite improbably, her cousins.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  What are the chances?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  What are the chances? But she also, along the way, comes into a great fortune. So Jane's been penniless all her life, and suddenly she's an heiress. And then Sungin 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,

• 12:53Speaker 00

  and charmingly unaffected, which is all very Jane. And I think, before we get into Charlotte and her life, for anyone that loves the Brontes or loves their work, as I do, it's 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 mythologised, they are unusually dogged by tragedy, wouldn't you say?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  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-

• 13:30Speaker 00

  No, I got loads of grief from listeners.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  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, I don't want the East of Eden treatment.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  This is like a massive trauma for you. Anyway, so Charlotte Bronte is the third of six children, to remind people, born to Patrick Bronte and Maria Bronwell in this Yorkshire village of Thornton. And when she's four, they move to 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, 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.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  He started his own school at 16, by the way. At the age of 16, I was kind of mid Babylonian captivity. Starting schools was not something I would have been capable of. So that's quite something.

• 14:36Speaker 01

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

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Too busy climbing up flagpoles.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  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, Tabby?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  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 listened to the Wuthering Heights episode will remember that. They made themselves ill by drinking runoff water from the local graveyard. Corpse water seems a bit extreme. It's not surprising, really, given their shabby sort of conditions, that none of the children actually live very long. I mean, even the ones who end up as adults don't live that long. They don't quite fit in. Of course, Patrick is an, as 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.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  The Tim Burton stuff, this is totally the image of them, isn't it?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  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 colours, that I was the captain of the Baileal Dinamo's football team, and she just will not listen.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  What was it? The, the, the Baileal Dinamo's? 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-snorkling team, you know?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  You're not listing your own sporting achievements here, Tabby, I notice.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean-

• 16:45Speaker 01

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

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Someone had to bring out the, the D-Team bibs.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Did you cut up the oranges for half-time?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  They're an incredibly bookish family, aren't they? I mean, the, the shelves lined with books, they read everything.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  We pointed this out in our Wuthering Heights episode. People find the fact that Emily, this young girl, wrote Wuthering Heights, extraordinary and explicable. But in a way, it is explicable when you think of their bookshelves that they grew up with. Surrounded by Byron, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. No Jane Austen, actually. But in later life, Charlotte Bronte read Jane Austen, and she was incredibly disparaging of her. Which I think is so interesting, because I think they're often coupled together as these two great female writers of English literature. Also, from a young age, they are scribbling, they're all writing. And they come up with these imaginary worlds, and they make up these stories. And there's Gondal, Glaston, Anglia. 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,

• 18:00Speaker 00

  and soldiers, and seduction, and vast battles. They have a rich, fertile inner life that they share, the siblings. So for instance, Charlotte Bronte wrote of their storytelling as children. "We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air," which I think is lovely. And then in 1839, the first tragedy in their lives hits. And this is Charlotte's mother, and she dies when Charlotte is only five years old.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  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 clergyman's daughters called Cowan Bridge. And Cowan Bridge is like your absolute trademark, kind of stereotypical 19th century school, where, you know, it's absolutely freezing, there's no food, everything is horrible, and you are subjected to this sort of reign of terror.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  The burnt porridge.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  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. You know, when something goes wrong like that, it sticks in your head forever, right?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  There's a terrible typhoid outbreak, as there is in Jane Eyre.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yes. They're, they're physically punished, they're hungry all the time, all of this kind of thing. When they're at the school, the two of the older Bronte girls, that's Maria and Elizabeth, get TB, don't they? And, you know, the school may not be single-handedly responsible, but it's probably part of it. There's an argument that Maria Bronte is one of the inspirations for Helen Burns, who is Jane Eyre's great friend, the kind of saintly martyr in the book. And obviously, that means that from a very early age, the Bronte sisters are brought face to face with their own mortality, disease, death, suffering, all of this sort of thing. Charlotte, from a very young age, people said, well, she'll be a governess. I mean, this is a classic Victorian thing. Basically, if you're from a poor, or reasonably poor family-

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Shabby gentility, I guess.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Shabby, shabby genteel, exactly, sort of family. And you're bright, you'll go off to be a governess, which is to say, you will hold a position, which is not quite that of a servant, but not really a member of the household either. So as people sometimes said about Victorian governesses, they're 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.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  So it's like this awful in-between thing, where you're, 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?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that, of course, anticipates what happens to, to Jane Eyre. So when Jane gets to Thornfield Hall, she's in this sort of in-between world. And Charlotte is so aware of this. So Charlotte wrote to Emily at one point, she said, "As a governess, I'm not considered as a living and rational being." And I think Charlotte, her sense of being an outsider, her sense of being awkward, her sense of being on the fringes of something and not taken seriously, and not appreciated. I mean, of course, that's a feeling that we all have. It's part of the human condition. But she has it, I think, very powerfully. She's shy. People say she's not terribly good-looking. You know, all of this finds its way into the portrait of her great narrator.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  She was painfully, tragically aware of her own appearance. People have, you know, her biographers, people who have written about her, people that knew her, have been quite disparaging about her physical appearance. It's interesting, because there's a very well-known portrait of her. This is the 1850 sketch by George Richmond, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, which is how I think most people, it's kind of how she's been immortalised, and she's very elegant and quite pretty-looking in that. In reality, Elizabeth Gaskell described her as plain. So did her publisher, George Smith, and looking very old-fashioned.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And when people say plain in the 19th century, they're basically mean a bit ugly. Am I wrong?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yes. Because she was described by both and by other people as having a head that was slightly too big for her body. And she was, she was very, very small. And she had a fragile, slender figure, reddish-brown hair. And people said that she had a large nose, a crooked mouth, and a slightly overhanging forehead, which is just awful, because all I can picture is like, I don't know, a cartoon from Family Guy or something.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, my God. I didn't see that coming.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Oh, and also Elizabeth Gaskell is generous enough to mention the fact that she had lots of teeth missing. So that's kind. Close friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  But also that her eyes are glowing?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  No, but I think this is really nice. This is, I think, reassuring when, when you've slightly built an altar to the, 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 afterthought. You know, you're telling me her head is too big, her forehead literally looms over her nose. You need to say something nice.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  When you describe that, when you describe every particular, do you know what that adds up to? ET. She looks like ET. The overhanging head, she's very short.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  The glowing eyes.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Oh, her face shone with personality, but striking, unconventional.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  She had a great personality, she had a wonderful sense of humour.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  But she didn't.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  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 twenties, 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. And this is Constantine Hegger, 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.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  And tellingly, in the first book that Charlotte Bronte 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 Hegger. And we know this because we have surviving letters, but this passion was entirely unrequited. So Claire Harmon, who is Charlotte's biographer, has said that it's probably because, you know, Charlotte was very inexperienced. As we said in our Wuthering Heights episode, she'd barely had any experience of men in the real world, outside of her father and her brother. And she probably conflated Hegger'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,

• 24:20Speaker 00

  and comparing her longing, her affection to him for a starving person begging for crumbs. And Jane actually says something like that, quite similar to Rochester at one point, when she thinks she has to leave him. Because she thinks that Rochester's going to marry Blanche Ingram. And she says, "Do you think I can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips?" So it's as if, you know, he's her sustenance and that's kind of what Charlotte is saying in this letter. Jane is stronger and more forthright in the way that she declares it, though. But Hegger 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.

• 24:55Speaker 01

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

• 24:59Speaker 00

  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 fulfillment for Charlotte, imagining the future she would have hoped for. So I think that's quite touching.

• 25:22Speaker 01

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

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that in itself raises quite an interesting point because Emily obviously also wrote dark, angry, satanic 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 their reading, as we will see.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, especially they love Byron, don't they? And we'll come on to Byron a little bit later. Anyway, so how did they get into writing? Charlotte comes back from Brussels, 1844. She starts reading her sister Emily's poem. She's like, God, these are brilliant. And the three of them, that is to say, Charlotte, Emily and their sister Anne, send all their stuff to London publishers under the assumed names Curran, 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.

• 26:22Speaker 00

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

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly so. But the early years of Charlotte's literary career, of course, are dogged by the family tragedies. Basically, they all start to die. Their brother Bramwell, who's an artist and a poet, but is basically off his face on booze and laudanum. He dies. At his funeral, Emily catches, well, she gets 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 Anne dies as well. And basically, Charlotte, who was part of this extremely tight family group, suddenly finds they're all, or a lot of them are dead. Well, they're all dead, actually. She says, "I feel blind with grief.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  One by one, I have watched them fall asleep on my arm and close their glazed eyes." I mean, this is heartbreaking, heartbreaking stuff.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  And also, let's not forget, these are unusually close siblings because they're so isolated. They've just had each other.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And so after this, you know, unsurprisingly, she has some very, very dark periods, very low periods. Actually, Villette, you mentioned Villette. I did Villette at school. I found it unbelievably boring, actually.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  I found it really boring too. I can barely remember it.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But it's all set in Belgium with a bloke that she falls in love with. It's basically that.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  But nothing really happens.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  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?

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, I think, something a lot of people forget about Charlotte Bronte. In 1854, she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nichols. It took some persuading, but eventually she agreed. Her father was very against this, slightly hypocritically, because he was very proud of Charlotte's fame and success. And he thought that Nichols, as a poor Irishman, was beneath her. Anyway, nevertheless, married they did in June of that year. Patrick didn't come to the wedding.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Right, nice.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  In a strange turn of events, they moved into Patrick's parsonage, so slightly awkward cohabitation.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  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, now, it is strange and solemn and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot is far, far different."

• 28:53Speaker 01

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

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Hardly matrimonial bliss there. But then, again, quite sweetly, Arthur grew on her because she wrote in the letter six months later that Arthur was "a dear boy, and he is dearer to me today than he was six months ago." I mean, arguably, that's not a massive improvement because she loathed him six months ago. But I, I think that's rather sweet. And also, hope for us all soon to be walking down the aisle. And also, there are accounts written by the two servants who were working at the parsonage, who worked for the family. And they reported that the couple were very happy. But alas, not for long. Charlotte became pregnant very quickly and she fell ill and died, along with her unborn baby, on the 31st of March, 1855, at only 38 years old. 38 years old and the oldest surviving Bronte. So that's sad.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  But of course, the, the big reason there's a Bronte industry is that the, 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 to 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 Hattersidge in Derbyshire. This place, North Lees Hall, belonged to a family called the Ayers, or the Ayers 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.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Big spoiler there for everyone.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we know that Charlotte Bronte visited North Lees House in 1845, don't we? So that's one of the great inspirations. There are other inspirations, of course. So Claire Harmon points out that Patrick Bronte had written a book about a virtuous girl fighting off a rake.

• 30:47Speaker 00

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

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Salty Pat?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Well, so he's the rake in this.

• 30:54Speaker 00

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

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Melodramatic side.

• 30:57Speaker 00

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

• 31:02Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  For instance, a big influence on all the Brontes was Walter Scott. And she was actually reading his book Marmion while she was writing Jane Eyre. And then also Shakespeare. And in the way that Jane Eyre, in its structure, it kind of has five parts to it. Which loosely, you know, that's kind of the structure of a lot of Shakespearean plays, the five act Shakespearean play. There's also, you can detect the influence of one of my absolute favourites, and now one of your son's absolute favourites. And this is Milton's Paradise Lost. So the satanic anti-hero, there is this journey of a spiritual fall and then a redemption. So always delighted to get Milton into the show. And then another old friend, or what I would consider to be more of a sort of tedious acquaintance. And that is John Bunyan and his book Pilgrim's Progress.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  John Buckland, The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buckland, he 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.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  I think it sounds so boring.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  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 Weiss and all of this kind of stuff. And they emerge a better person at the end.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  It's like the hero's journey from Greek tragedy, but, but Christianised, 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.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And going through the different stages, the five, the five stops.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. So it's Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End, and then ultimately Ferndean. But I think one of the greatest influences on the, on Jane Eyre, as with Wuthering Heights, and actually also on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne 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 was 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.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I mean, the red room, we haven't really talked about the red room, maybe we'll talk about it later, but it's such a, it's a really, you know, again, literary critics, particularly feminist literary critics, love this red room. As a child, she's, she's sort of locked up all the meaning, different meanings that the red room might have. And it's a very, and this is a mad thing to say, and I'm, I'm reading The Shining at the moment, and I kind of imagined the red room is one of the rooms of the Overlook Hotel or something.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  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. So, and it's full of these hauntings, to harken 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. So it's undeniably a massive, massive part of Jane Eyre.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Cinderella.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Has Mr. Rochester got all his old wives locked up in, you know, kind of, you know, his, their severed, their severed heads in this, in some secret room or whatever? And Jane herself talks. I mean, this is one of the things you see. Jane talks about the memories of nursery stories. And she says, "And when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigor and vividness beyond what childhood could give." There's a point when she's outside, she sees the horse coming towards her through the dusk, and she remembers tales that she has been told by her kind of nurse when she was little of a North England spirit called a guy trash.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  I love this bit because I love folklore.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've established you're a massive folklore enthusiast.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I was excited by this.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  "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.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  And that that, you know, we sense that as readers, and that gives the book this lovely extra kind of texture, that even though, as we'll go on to describe, this is in many ways a realist novel, one grounded in objective reality and in like 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.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  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. So Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Coleridge. There's a strong dose of that kind of writing in this, in the, 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's ode to a nightingale.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a Twilight Garden.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So for instance, lines like, "The little brown birds which stirred occasionally in the hedge looked like single russet leaves I had forgotten to drop." I mean, that's such gorgeous writing. And then, as you say, it is also the realist novel, you know, it's rooted in the tradition of 19th century realism. So this is the domesticity. We always know what people are wearing. We're always told what Jane is wearing. The fact that we are told what characters see and hear and touch. The opening line of the novel, for instance, is deceptively casual. "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." And I think the way that Charlotte Bronte weaves that realism together with the enchanted Gothic feel of it that we were just talking about, I think that is a huge part of its genius. And that's something that Wuthering Heights doesn't really do. It's not really rooted in the real world in the same way.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Agreed. I think Wuthering Heights is more one note. I think this functions on lots of different levels.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  So many different planes.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  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, there very well may be fairies and ghouls and goblins and something more.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  I can see where this appeals to you, Tabby, because this is completely your.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Right up my street. Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  This is Tabitha Syrett, bingo, exactly. So she's done it. How is it published? I mean, this is an interesting story.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  It is actually.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  So the publisher, Thomas Newby, has agreed to do Wuthering Heights by Emily, and Charlotte sends him her own book, The Professor. And Newby says, "No good. You know, I don't want to do The Professor. It's rubbish." So Newby has rejected The Professor. Charlotte then works on Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is rejected, but it's picked up by another publisher, George Smith. And he said, "When he first read it, the story quickly took me captive. Before 12 o'clock, my horse came to the door, but I could not put the book down." Anyone who's read Jane Eyre will find that very familiar, I think. So Smith rushes out Jane Eyre under the title, Jane Eyre, an autobiography. And this is a classic kind of novelistic conceit to pretend that it's real and it's a real autobiography. And they pretend that Cora Bell is merely the editor.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  And by the way, George Smith hasn't met Charlotte Bronte at this point. He doesn't know that she's a woman.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. That's a good fact. It's a huge hit, very successful. And actually, it's so successful that Smith, Eller 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. Cora Bell, who knows who Cora Bell is, a new style, all of this." However, there are also critics at the time who say, "No, this book is shocking. It's

• 40:25Speaker 01

  ungodly. It is un-Christian. It is subversive." The most famous review, notorious, Elizabeth Rigby in the Quarterly Review, 1848, says, "This book is basically an act of social rebellion. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor." And she actually goes on to say, "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."

• 40:48Speaker 00

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

• 40:51Speaker 01

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

• 40:53Speaker 00

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

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  The minute that she crossed the threshold.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  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. So.

• 41:06Speaker 00

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

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's a huge success. Thackeray's daughter said, "It's set all London, talking, reading, speculating. People want to know who wrote it."

• 41:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Such a theme. Woman in white again. So lots of speculation at the time about who wrote it. And Charlotte Bronte never admitted it.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  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 modelled 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 Charis Wilson. And then the people that liked Charis Wilson came back and they said that she had to retract what she'd said. But then eventually Charlotte and Anne travelled to London in 1848 and they revealed their true identities to the publisher, because there were all these rumours and false claims going around. So they wanted to definitively put that to bed. But I think that's quite a nice image, isn't it? These two young women stepping into a publisher's office for the first time.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, lovely.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  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, in a preface to a different edition, "Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion." And to attack the first is not to assail the last. And I think that's well said, actually.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  But it made me wonder whether, you know, that, the fact that she released a later edition of Wuthering Heights, cutting out a lot of the more frenzied, passionate elements of it, and wrote a defence of her sister Emily, the fact that she prevented the Tenet of Wildfell Hall, after its initial 1848 publication, from being released again until 1854, because she was shocked by it, and she didn't like that other people were shocked by it. I wonder if there was an element of Charlotte Brontë's nature where she cared a lot about what people thought of her. She wanted to be respectable and fit in. But actually, she was brimming with fire and passionate views, and so uses her prose to manifest that, to release that.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Makes total sense.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  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 kick-started the Brontë industry. So creates the idea of the Brontë myth, the windswept moors, the isolated, strange family who are producing these works of absolute genius.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  From nowhere.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Their corpse water.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, their corpse water. What is lost is the complexity and the sophistication of the book. And this book in particular, I think, because for me, it's one of the great achievements in English writing. I mean, so far ahead of even loads of other kind of canonical books. It's endlessly fascinating. And actually, we could do 100 podcasts on it, and we wouldn't exhaust all the nuances and ambiguities of the book. So actually, I'll tell you what we should do, Tabby, we should probably take a break. And then, shall we talk about 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. Oh, my God, it's so exciting. Huge.

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• 47:06Speaker 01

  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 been listening 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. 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.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  This is the elite circle.

• 47:49Speaker 01

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

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  The idea of a first-person epistolary narrative is not that unusual. It's very popular in the 18th century. So that's where you are in the reader's head, and it's like she's speaking to you, you're party to her most private revelations. But Jane Eyre is unusual. It's an unusually feminine voice, which is funny, given that a lot of people thought the writer was male. And she speaks more directly to you than is normal. So for instance, she will say, "Oh, romantic reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth." And at the time, this was inevitably personal, and it was unusual in its security. 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

• 48:44Speaker 00

  best things about the book. And Thackeray, so he's come up a lot on the show, because he was a big hero of Brontes. He says of Jane's narrative voice, "Which of her readers has not been her friend? And that is how it feels. She's tender and intimate, and yet she's forthright and honest. She's emotionally naked, but she continues to confide. So you feel like you trust her, that you see all sides of her. And you feel like you trust her because she is also unusually self-knowing."

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that's absolutely the point, isn't it? She is reflective and self-knowing. Her narrative voice, she's aware of you existing? I mean, that's very unusual.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  She addresses you directly as reader. I remember there's a sketch in A Bitter Fry and Laurie, the Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie sketch show.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  This is a big favourite of Arthur's, isn't it?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  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."

• 49:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  But because you're so bought into her world and her life and the things that happened to her.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  She has rage, actually.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  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 with the Reeds, and they put her in the Red Room. I mean, people are always trying to cage her, to imprison her as something, and she's trying to escape. So that starts with the Red Room, and then the school. And I think the single biggest thing about Jane that is innovative, actually, for a Victorian female character, she will not be defined and downtrodden by other people.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Biggest of authority, they don't cower her one bit.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  No. She doesn't have parents, she has friends, but she doesn't have that much help. She has to make her own way in the world. But she is a terrifically resilient character. And actually, she defines herself in many ways through resisting others, doesn't she? "I've never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, between absolute submission and determined revolt." And determined revolt is one of the things. I mean, she's always caught between these things, because of course, the way she calls Rochester master suggests kind of submissiveness. But she is determined to, I mean, determined revolt is the essence of her personality. She's poor, she's not well-favoured by circumstance, you know, she's not good-looking, she can't use her sex appeal.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Her plainness is an important facet of her character, and it was important to Charlotte Brontë that she said that she 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.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  That's so true, because when Mr. Rochester wants to give her a glow-up, she doesn't like it. She says, "I want to be me."

• 52:32Speaker 00

  I'd be like, what you got? What you got?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Are we talking?

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Would you react like that?

• 52:35Speaker 00

  No. I mean, I'd bring it on.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course you would. Of course you would. I saw you at the photo shoot and you were all in.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  I know, I was flicking my hair.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Well, I was there with my jumper.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  You were flicking your hair.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  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 chatting with the stylist about her clothes. And then I said to the stylist, and where did my jumper come from? Yours was stuff with like caramel and 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.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  You know, sometimes you can overgild the lily and we wouldn't have wanted to do that to you.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  They wanted my natural beauty to come through.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  To shine through.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Let's return to Jane Eyre.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  She lectures herself and I think that's such a good way, that's such a lesson to myself. You know, to have a little word with myself from time to time and be like, stopping a brat.

• 53:50Speaker 01

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

• 53:53Speaker 00

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

• 53:56Speaker 01

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

• 53:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  There's this extremely well-known passage where she has a rant at Rochester. Feminist critics understandably love it. Maybe you should read it, Tabby.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  When I first read this when I was 12, this was a passage that I was particularly drawn through and I memorized it.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Oh my God, you can do it from memory? Well, you're going to have to look at your notes.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  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 of you and I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I would have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. Almost, almost by heart.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Oh, well done. So for people who are only listening and not watching, Tabby had to look down once at the word, at the God bit, but the rest of it you did do from memory.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. Do you think because I'm poor and obscure and plain, I don't matter? I have as much soul as you do. I love it.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  The organisation of the words, poor, obscure, plain and little, that has a gorgeous rhythm to it.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Agreed. So that's Jane. We love Jane. Brilliant. And now we come to, I mean, now I really am looking in the mirror.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  That comparison has dogged you all your life.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Mr. Rochester.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Dominic Rochester.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  So brooding, dark, masterful.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  You're Edgar Linton and we all know it, okay?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Is that Clem Fandango? That's played by Clem Fandango in, isn't it? Edgar Linton. I'm absolutely not Edgar Linton, just to be absolutely clear. So Mr. Rochester, he is the sort of cousin of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but he's a much better character than Heathcliff, I think. They're both dark haired, they're both swarthy, they're both rugged and brooding and all of this. And they're both clearly derived from Lord Byron, who the Brontes adored. And Rochester arrives in the story as a character from a Gothic romance, doesn't he? He's riding this gigantic black horse. He's got the huge black dog.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Loping at his side.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  It's twilight.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  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 multiple, many times, isn't it?

• 56:52Speaker 00

  It's important, yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  That he's not conventionally good-looking, again, maybe a parallel, but he exudes terrific sex appeal.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there it is.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Honestly. Put down that mirror. It's extraordinary. Unbelievable. And so, and this sex, so going back to the sex appeal, so obviously Heathcliff is the character who has endured as a sex symbol. I don't think Rochester has to the same degree, though at the time, the Quarterly Review warned that the generosity and honour of his character is almost like a trap. It means that it enchants lady readers to overlook 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 likeable character. He's less violent. He's less vengeful. He actually has a very good sense of humour and I think that he's not so much a bad boy in the way that Heathcliff is.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  And I think that's why Heathcliff has this sex appeal to us now. So, I mean, put it this way, Jacob Elordi would never play Rochester and he certainly would never play Rochester with a gold tooth and an earring. He's not that wild and untamed Rochester. You know, he's a much more sensible, good-natured person.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. He's more three-dimensional than Heathcliff. He's not a melodramatic caricature.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  He's playful, actually.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he can be quite wry. He can, he's very sardonic, but he can be good-humoured. There's the tremendous bounce of him dressing up as the gypsy fortune teller.

• 58:17Speaker 00

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

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I think there's a lovely flirtatiousness actually in their relationship.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  There really is.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  No, because even Austen's books, the love interest, they're never that playful, are they?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  No, they're not. And they're not, there's not the sensuality in Jane Austen really, is there? I mean, that's the one thing that Charlotte Brontes didn't like about Jane Austen. They thought Jane Austen was a bit.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Contained.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a bit pallid and a bit bloodless.

• 59:00Speaker 00

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

• 59:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:15Speaker 00

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

• 59:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And that there's an irony to that and I love that.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  There is, there's a slight hint of the pseudo-masochism that we get in Wuthering Heights because, you know, he's dangling Blanche Ingram in front of her and saying, oh, I like her. And so he's, you know, he's basically playing hard to get. And then Jane is always taunting him, you know, she's saying, oh, you know, sir, you're very plain. She notes the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns. I mean, it's textbook flirting, isn't it?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  It is total, totally is. Now, talking about great flirtatious relationships and people exuding a raw animal sensuality, what about Sinjin Rivers? So when she leaves Rochester and she goes off to, by a remarkable coincidence, to find herself living with their cousins, the Rivers family, and there's this guy Sinjin, who is the curate and he is the soul of Christian charity, of philanthropy. And he basically says to Jane, listen, Jane, I think you should marry me and come off to India and be missionaries.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Can I read you his proposal?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, go on, go for it.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Just quickly to say before I read this, there's a similar, so he is dogmatic, chilly, pure, perfect. So he's a lovely foil to the fire earthiness, the flawed nature of Rochester. So if you look at the proposal that Rochester makes to Jane and it's full of feeling and heart and passionate emotions and declarations, this is Sinjin Rivers' offering on the proposal front. God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you. You are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary's wife you must and shall be. You shall be mine. I claim you, not for my pleasure, but for my sovereign service. And I'm just saying, if we're to propose to me like that, not a chance would I have agreed.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  God intended you for a missionary's wife. And Jane says, you know, I would, I would literally die if I married you. So abominable would that be to my passion, my soul, my principles.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  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 Sinjin Rivers. And they say that what Charlotte Brontë is doing, which I think maybe arguably she is, is that she is morally equating this refusal of Sinjin 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 Brontë grew up with a pastor, father, and the book is full of godly sentiment. So Helen Burns says at one point, you think too much of the love of human beings, you're too impulsive, too vehement.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  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 Sinjin Rivers and they are full of Christian

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  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 Brontë, that the love, the relationship that she is trying to encourage is one that is both physical and emotional and that is based on true, and 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.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  The passionate side of her.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  And also, I think St. John Rivers doesn't want her for her. He wants her because he wants a kind of-

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  He wants her labour.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, spoiler.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  You're right, the 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?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Revolutionary.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Revolutionary. And the reason they do that is because the 1840s is a very politically anxious and turbulent time. Revolutions across Europe in 1848. You've got a fact here that had actually never occurred to me before. Fantastic, actually, I'd never thought of this. The Communist Manifesto is published a year after Jane Eyre.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  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-

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Coincidences.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, synchronisations of history or something.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  But critics at the time did see these things side by side there, didn't they? They saw Jane Eyre as part of, as a product of revolutionary turmoil. You mentioned already, was it Elizabeth Rigby, is it, in the Quarterly Review? Her critical commentary on Jane Eyre at the time, "We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code, human, divine, abroad, and fostered chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre." She mentions chartism. The chartist movement is 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.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  So Charlotte Bronte would undoubtedly have been aware of all this. Funny 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.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  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? Can I bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips?" On a more personal level, she knew what it was to work hard and live, often humiliatingly, alongside but beneath the rich, the gentry. She was a working woman in a world that often exploited, you know, poor, single working women. Think of that scene where Jane is dismissed and mocked by the landed aristocratic, rich Ingrams.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  The gilets 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.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's, it's like, 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 is 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.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just her, from the very beginning, when she's with Mrs. Reed. And she says, you know, she resists Mrs. Reed and her cousins. "I resisted all the way like any other rebel slave." Those words would like send, you know, there'd be a lot of conservative-minded readers in the 1840s who'd be like, oh dear, oh, this is very subversive.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  It's France all over again.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  She always claims equality with him.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Exactly, she always, it 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 it, doesn't she? "It is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures' eye and 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.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  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. It is my spirit addressing your spirit." And she's saying that if we look at ourselves from within on the spiritual plane, we are one. So you can see why Jane Eyre was read into many quarters as almost a feminist manifesto when it came out.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Feminist critics have always loved this book, yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Likewise, you know, the tenant of Wildfell Hall, these were women that knew what it was to be a downtrodden woman at this time. And for instance, when she marries Rochester, we spoke about how he 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. And I think by the end of the book, she spiritually redeems him and actually physically redeems him too. And even though that both of her love interests try to turn her into paragons of something,

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  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 counterargument to this would be, is that there's a dark, we haven't really gone on to the secret yet, of course, that is hanging over this, but there is a darker side to this book the whole time. You could say, Mr. Rochester is actually a bit of a monster of a man. He's very bad-tempered, he's manipulative.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  He's a bigamist.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  So she's 18 and he's 40.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Two years legal.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd kind of raise your, raise, raise her eyebrows a little bit. However, Tabby, I know that you actually find this incredibly romantic.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  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 overt romance. I think that that proposal in the orchard, regardless of what happens later, you know, Jane's disbelief, the teasing, the mocking, the way he then puts all his cards on the table and begs her, the way that he really seems to see what is unique about Jane, I think that's one of the most romantic passages in all literature. "I am no bird and no net ensnares me." She says, "You know, I'm a free human being with an independent will of my own that I now exert to leave you." And then he says, "No, you can't. My bride is here because my equal is here and my likeness. Will you be mine? Say yes."

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there were strong workings in the features and strange gleams in the eyes. "Oh, Jane, you torture me. Jane, accept me quickly. Say Edward, give me my name. Edward, I will marry you." She's so baffled. She's like, "A human earnest, do you truly love me? Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife?" And he says, "I do." And then it's this wonderful thing, she says, "Then, sir, I will marry you." I mean, honestly, it's, it's magnificently romantic and it's in this twilight garden. And obviously, a lot of that, that illusion of a happy ending is later shattered, but that in itself is romantic because it means that romantic inevitability isn't going to tie them together, fate isn't going to intervene, they're going to have to choose each other.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  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."

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  "I'm rich now as well."

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, "You're also a massive liar." And 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.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Mutual respect, and that's what makes it as much more mature romance than Wuthering Heights, you know? They have this wonderful back and forth that we alluded to, but for, 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 Cathy and Heathcliff. You know, he says at one point, "I feel as if there is a string somewhere under my left rib knotted to a similar one under your rib, and if it snapped, I would take to bleeding internally." So that is, there is something inexplicable about that, that transcends earthly love.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we believe that they have a sensual, there's a sensuality and eroticism.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it is erotic, totally, yeah.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Now, talking about sensuality.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, every good romance needs to have, you know, a triangle. There needs to be a love rival. And I would say that Jane's is arguably one of the most formidable in all, in all literature. So reveal the dark secret lurking in the attic of Jane Eyre.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  Hence the laughter, the stabbings, the bitings.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, the ghostly behaviour, all this. And this is Bertha Antoinette Mason. And she is a character who contains volumes. Like, people have written not just academic books, but they have written novels about her. Because she is, you can see her as the representation of sexuality run amok.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Alcoholism in some, some takes.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  She's a Gothic vampire because she bites people in the neck.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  She's always described using animals, metaphors and similes, hyena.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  I mean, this description, when Jane first meets her. What it was where the 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, like, all of this kind of thing.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

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

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  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. The idea of this sort of mad woman that you need to lock away runs through Victorian

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  society and culture.

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Because also divorce laws at this time, you couldn't divorce someone for being insane. Hence people, you know, shipping their wives off to assailants left, right and centre.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  So you can see why critics, particularly in the 60s, 70s, 80s, said, well, is she, is this about race? Is she the dark secret of Britain's involvement in slavery and the racism of the British Empire? Is she the violence and the evil of the empire that has returned to haunt our native lands?

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  The infection of the colonies, you know, imperial Gothic at this time was full of, full of these kind of tropes.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically anticipating Dracula to some extent.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  So there's that. Or, by contrast, Jane is the ultimate English heroine. She's an English rose.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Everything about her belies the 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.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  But at the same time, you could say Bertha represents sexuality. She represents Rochester's dark secret, but to some degree, you could say, and some critics have said this, she's Jane's id. She's Jane's dark secret too. Her sexual desires, her wildness, you know, all of that.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  Jane is a child actively, even bites someone, which is what Bertha does, you know? Jane is often described using animal metaphors and similes likewise.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Jane is locked up in the red room and Bertha is locked up in the attic.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  And the only expression of sympathy in the book at one point comes from Jane. Jane chastises Rochester for being, thinking of his wife so inhumanely. But it's only once, which actually has raised another thing, which where some people have said, this could be the point at which Jane Eyre becomes an unreliable narrator because she spent the whole book trying to unseat the former Mrs Rochester. I.e. Bertha is unredemptive in order to redeem Mr Rochester. And that's Jane's purpose throughout the book.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Creole novelist Jean Rhys, she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and a massive confession now. It's one of the, you know, 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, you have read it, haven't you?

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  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 have, and she's treated badly throughout her life. And 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.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  It's quite hard to read Jane Eyre without thinking of Bertha as potentially misunderstood and potentially mistreated.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  No, I think we should, yeah, reader, I marked it in shaggy head bigamists, I reckon.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  So I'm going to give it 10 out of 10.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. Love to hear it.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  It's one of the, I was thinking this morning before we started recording, are there other, well, what books in English compete with this? I think in, as 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.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  Maybe that's fair, yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  I think Jane is one of the great, the great fictional creations, as is Mr Rochester. I had read it before, I loved rereading it. And as soon as I finished rereading it, I genuinely thought to myself, I'm looking forward to reading it again in a few years' time. I mean, I'd be mad to read, I mean, obviously this podcast will have to have come to an end before I ever have time to read Jane Eyre again.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Why would you do that to yourself?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  But I think it's an unalloyed masterpiece. And the reason so much ink has been spilled about it is because there is just so much to say and the conversations about it will never end. So yeah, 10 out of 10.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  Good, good for you. I'm also going to give it 10 out of 10. It's spellbinding, it's urgent, it's just full of this emotional depth that we haven't even begun to penetrate during the course of this discussion. Jane Eyre, I think, is probably my top three leading literary heroines of all time. Another thing that I think people underestimate is how readable it is. You don't want to put it down, you want to know what happens next. And to have a book of this degree of literary sophistication, so beautifully written, and yet to inject it with intensity and make it readable, to combine all those genres and tropes in one piece of writing is just, it's a, it's an extraordinary achievement. I think maybe, I mean, I'm sure I will change my mind at some point, but because I'm massively

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Although it hasn't scored as high as The Code of the Worcester's, which I think got 11 out of 10.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that was.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  That's an elite of a saying.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  That's just with a sheer bounce though, isn't it?

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so much to talk about with Jane Eyre and we've only, I know we've only scratched the surface.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Don't forget to sign up to our own beloved club of imprisoned lunatics and sign up to Book Club Notes.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  I don't know, I've kind of changed my mind. I think it's brilliant, I think it's brilliant, but I just, I just think they were better.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  You're not sucking up to Emily anymore, that's sad.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  I haven't been sufficiently rewarded so now.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  On that bombshell, bye bye, everybody.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  Bye bye.

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