In Our Time - Jane Eyre

Episode Date: June 18, 2015

The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gateshead Hall and then at Lowood School. She leaves the school for Thornfield Hall, to become governess to the French ward of Mr Rochester. She and Rochester fall in love but, at their wedding, it is revealed he is married already and his wife, insane, is kept in Thornfield's attic. When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it was a great success and brought fame to Charlotte Bronte. Combined with Gothic mystery and horror, the book explores many themes, including the treatment of children, relations between men and women, religious faith and hypocrisy, individuality, morality, equality and the nature of true love. WithDinah Birch Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of LiverpoolKaren O'Brien Vice Principal and Professor of English Literature at King's College LondonAndSara Lyons Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of KentProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1847, Jane Ey was published with the author's name given as Curra Bell. It was the work of Charlotte Bronte, written at the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, and it brought her success and a fame that long outlived her short life. It's the story of an orphan brought up by a cruel aunt, then sent to the harsh Lowwood School. From there, she becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, for the ward of Mr. Rochester, and overcomes many obstacles in life and romance, including the fact that he's still married to a woman he keeps hidden away. Janeair quickly became one of the most popular works in English fiction and remains popular for the strength of the main character Jane and the tightly bound themes of personal freedom, equality for women and the need for education and the role of religion.

With me to discuss Janeair are Dina Burge, Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Liverpool. Karen O'Brien, Vice Principal and Professor of English Literature at King's College London, and Sarah Lyons, lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. Diana Burge, what do we need to understand about Charlotte Bronte's family in her early life? Well, she was born in Yorkshire, a Yorkshire woman, in 1816. She was the third of six children, born into a happy and thriving family, remarkable parents. I think one thing we do need to know about is the extraordinary nature and career of her father, Patrick Bronte, who was Irish, born as the son of a poor farmer in County Down, who had worked his way to success and gentility as an Anglican clergyman through education. He had founded his own school at the age of 16, which I do think is a very remarkable thing.

How many 16-year-olds do we know who could found their own school? He had then managed to get himself to Cambridge, where he had achieved very high academic honours and qualified himself to become a clergyman. He had taught education runs through his life as a theme, and had then become perpetual curate at Howarth. It is an exceptional story, and for Charlotte, he was a hero. Her mother, Maria, was a Cornish woman, devoted to her husband, saucy pat, she would call him. There were six children.

There were, however, quite soon only four children. Can we take that on? They were educated at home, and they were educated by an aunt who took the place of a mother who died when she was five. And then they were sent to a school which was for the daughters of clergymen, and it was very cheap, and it was a fairly cruel and a school that seemed to be prone to letting the children die. I mean, there were a lot of deaths and two of her sisters died, which had a big effect on that. Can you tell us a bit more about that school, which became Lowood School in the novel? Yes. It was the clergy daughter's school.

Four of Patrick's daughters were sent there. In 1824, it was a very harsh regime. One of the main problems was that the children were underfed. And there was very little medical care. And as you rightly say, there was a high... death rate. It wasn't quite the monstrous establishment that we encounter in Lowood. Charlotte was there for 10 months in all and she is drawing on childhood memory, heavily coloured, of course, by the loss of those two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth.

The depiction of the clergy daughter's school at Cambridge in Lancashire in Jane Eyre is really the one thing that no one forgets. Whatever you remember about Janeair, you will remember the burnt porridge. The other thing that you are very unlikely to forget is the character of Mr Brocklehurst, who established that the Lowood, but we also established clergy daughters' school,

and of course presented in Jane Eyre is a perfect monster of hypocrisy and cruelty. He was founded on a man called William Carus Wilson, and I think it really is the case that Charlotte Bronte was not entirely fair to William Carus Wilson in the way in which she projects the character of Mr. Brocklehurst. But she doesn't have to be fair, she's writing a novel, isn't she? You don't have to be fair me right now, that's the deal.

Okay, Karen O'Brien, what would Charlotte Bronte have been, reading by the time you wrote Janeer? She was reading Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. She was reading Byron. She was reading Scott. She was reading the Bible, Shakespeare, a great many other things besides. I think it's important to say, however, that in addition to her reading, she was also generating her own kind of literary narratives. So famously in an early poem, Charlotte Bronte said that of her and her sisters and her brother, we wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air. So all of the things that she reads nourish and nurture. this extraordinary collaboration between the four children

in the fantasy writings that they developed when they were very young and in some ways kind of composed their own literary world together. It's fascinating that one of the books she, I think she collaborated with Anne on, was called Angrier. Well, it's actually a fantasy world that she created more with her brother Bramwell

than with Anne. And it's a remote African country which is colonised by the descendants of these toy soldiers. that Patrick Bronte gave them, though, a little. The children seized on these toy soldiers. They gave them the names of public hero figures, like the Duke of Wellington and his sons. And out of those toy soldiers,

they created this fantasy country called Angrier, which is set somewhere in Africa, and there's a scene of battles and epic struggles and seductions and all kinds of exciting adventures. Did her father have a good library? I mean, was there plenty for her to read? He had a pretty good library, and he very actively encouraged his children to read.

He certainly encouraged them to read Wordsworth. We do know that Jane Austen wasn't on the shelves, and it was only later in life that Charlotte Bronte came to Jane Austen and was rather disparaging about her. But he gave them full access to the range of literary heritage. Another thing I should mention that she was aware of because they had the book read to them was Samuel Richardson's novels, the Not Pamela and Carissa from the mid-18th century,

I think were an important influence because they're novels about powerful aristocratic men who incarcerate and coerce young women into either rape or ultimately in Pamela's case into marriage. And I think that drama of the incarcerated woman and the powerful man is something that very much shaped Charlotte's early thinking. But having me in a teacher and not like that and a governess while, not like it, she went to Belgium with her sister and fell in love with a married man.

Indeed. And that could be said to be the basis of her first novel, which was unsuccessful, but it needs to be mentioned. She did. She fell in love with a man called Constanta Ege, who was a remarkable teacher of English in this Belgian. school where she worked, who was really interested in drawing the writer out of her. I think he was the first person that really, apart from her sibling, spotted that inner self and that

inner flintiness, energy and creativity that Charlotte had. That then became the basis for the first novel that she wrote. She initially called the novel The Master, in deference, I think, to Constantin's masterful character, but she renamed it the professor and tried to get it published unsuccessfully in the 1840s, and it is the story of a man called William Crimsworth, who becomes a teacher in Belgium. So the whole experience in Belgium is reprised as a story of a man narrating in his own voice, his experiences

as a teacher. Was there any sense in which the failure of that book to get published jolted her, I'm going to write a book that gets published and does well? It absolutely did because it was rejected, I think, nine times by various London publishers and almost at the same time she starts writing Jane Eyre. There's something... But you've got a decision on her part. I read it in the notes of one of it. She said,

I'm going to write a book that a lot of people buy and this is it. It's a conscious decision. which is my sister's got something published. And Charlotte, like Jane, is a character who thrives on rejection and opposition, and there's something about that that cataly's her into writing a more accessible book. It was her sister's success, a goad as well. Her sister, Emily, yes. Well, they published a volume of poetry together, the three of them,

for the first time adopting the pseudonyms of Cara Ellis and Acton Bell. They paid for the publication themselves, and it was not successful. It was actually very disappointing in terms of sales. So by that time, Emily, wasn't thought of as successful. No, no indeed. I think Charlotte was amazed by the calibre of her poetry. It's something that she came across quite late

and believed that Emily could be successful, but they weren't at that point successful. Sarah Lyons, can you tell us about the principled characters of Jane, I said, the three or four of them? Okay. Or half a dozen would be better, wouldn't it? Well, I mean, it's often said that you can almost summarize the plot of the novel by saying it's sort of blue-beard meets Cinderella

or married Cinderella, which captures some of the sort of fairy tale logic, if not accounting for all of the narrative threads. So Jane S begins as a kind of orphan who is growing up with her wealthy relatives who sort of treat her as an interloper in the family. She's bullied by her cousin John Reed and by her aunt Reed.

It then moves on to lowered school where she, you know, encounters the sort of, you know, Mr. Brocklehurst, who, as was mentioned by Dinah is sort of this monster of hypocrisy, basically terrorises the girls with a kind of fire and brimstone theology, though she meets at the school some more sympathetic figures, including Miss Temple and Helen Burns, who are both kind of figures who give her, I suppose,

more positive role models in a way. She then becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets the sort of the masterful Mr. Rochester, who is sort of, you know, this sort of mysteriously gloom. by ironic character. They sort of fall in love, though Jane is sort of disturbed by these rather strange occurrences in the house, violent happenings, which she ascribes to the figure of the servant, Grace Poole, at the altar when she's about to wed Mr. Rochester, a character named Richard Mason shows up with a solicitor announcing that, in fact, he is already married,

that there is to his sister, Bertha Mason, who is the mad woman in the attic, the incarcerated woman. We learn a little of her biography. Jane frightened that she's going to become Rochester's mistress, flees to the countryside, wanders destitute in Hungary,

where she is providentially saved, basically, by two sisters and a clergyman who then turn out to be her cousins, in a kind of miraculous turn of events. She inherits a fortune from her uncle, who is a wine merchant in Madeira. The clergyman cousin, Sinjin Rivers, proposes to her,

but she rejects him because his offer of a kind of missionary marriage sort of pales by comparison to the passionate love she experienced with Rochester. In a moment of telepathic communication, Rochester says, come to me, Jane. She returns to Thornfield to find that it's been burnt to the ground by Bertha, who also died in the blaze, having flung herself from the top of Thornfield Hall. Jane and also Rochester has survived, but he is maimed and blind in one eye. He duly sort of humbled and penitent at the end of the narrative.

He and Jane reconcile, and they basically have happily ever after. That was brilliant. I think that's about 48,000 people take. taking exams, we're going to listen to that again and again and again, and they'll have no problem, thanks to you. Thank you very much. That was a tour de force. Can you, in what way to Jaina and Rochester do, or do they not represent romantic lovers? Well, in some ways, Rochester is more a vividly imagined example of a type than a wholly new character. I mean, as has already been mentioned a little bit, he's very much the archetype of bironic lover or baronic hero, sort of mysteriously sinful past, disillusioned with the world, glamorous, sort of given to,

sounding rather like Milton Satan in his kind of moment, in some moments, but also sounding like this rather wonderfully self-ironising Libertine at other moments. So there's an incredible playfulness to his language, and he's sort of given to very extravagant metaphors. He's quite, I think something's often not said about Rochester enough is that he's quite funny. So he, that, in a sense, I would say he's a vivid example of an archetype rather than an, you know, an unconventional hero. And Jane? Jane is in all kinds of ways an innovative character. The first thing is that she has this sort of potent and in some ways quite mysterious in its origin sense of self-worth,

which is the keynote of her character, and I'm sure we'll talk about that more. the other aspects of Jane that are remarkable and certainly Bronte herself believed this that creating a plain heroine was crucial. She emphasised that a lot, doesn't she? Yes, it matters an enormous deal. Short and plain. Short and plain. I'm going to create a heroine as short and plainness or smaller plain as myself.

And that plainness, I mean, it doesn't register as simple unattractiveness in the novel because it's got these connotations of this kind of puritan simplicity of dress and speech and also a kind of unvarnished honesty of character, which is a hallmark of Jane too. But nonetheless, this idea of the way in which having a plain hair and complicates Jane's experience of romantic love throughout,

you know, it's not a static detail of her character, but it's something that is really constitutive of all of her experience of romance. It's part of the key, the originality, which keys through an awful lot of book. Dina, Dina Bush, what impact did Jane have when it was published? It was a huge success. Some critics had a few reservations about its fiery nature,

that sense in which, as Elizabeth Rigby famously said, it seemed to represent a sort of ungodly discontent, but readers cared nothing for that. They thought it was wonderful. And you can see why it achieved that popularity, which indeed has endured. It is still a very popular novel. It has the thrills of the Gothic.

Karen's mentioned the importance of that 18th century precedent, which then translated into a Gothic idiom, which was very important to the Bronte siblings, and it's persistently there, those isolated houses, the gloomy context, the young woman in danger, who is preyed upon by a series of very unpleasant men from John Reed through to poor, Brocklehurst and in a different sense of John Rivers. She is vulnerable, but she persists.

It's full of incident. It's never dull. She moves from place to place, Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Fern Dean. So you have a kind of constantly changing scene. It's intensely emotional, also intellectual. It values the intellect, values thought. But it's also, I think, keenly aware. of the world around the characters. There's a lot of weather in Jane Eyre. The landscape brilliantly evoked, the houses, very domestic in some ways, what people are eating, what people are wearing.

You also have a pretty good idea of what Jane is wearing. You mentioned in terms of its reception, someone who was critical. The criticism was rather based on the idea that she was too revolutionary and two charges that were just going on and this wouldn't do, especially as it turned out from a woman.

But she had very strong supporters. The greatest was Thackeray, whom she admired enormously. So to be supported by her great hero must have been something. And it should be said that the balance of critical opinion was favourable. There were a few dissenting voices. But in general, people did recognise the quality of Jane Eyre. One of the things that I think did make it attractive at the time and since is that in Janeair, every character,

and we meet a good many characters, get exactly what he or she deserves. It doesn't happen in life, but it does happen in Janeair. That's where we have fiction. Yeah, well, we don't always get it in fiction, but we do get it in Janeair. And it is a very gratifying thing for a reader.

One of the reasons for its enduring success. Karen O'Brien, As has been mentioned by Sarah, this self-possession, self-belief is very strong. And I think that must have been very attractive to any readers. I mean, I was very attracted to it. I read it when I was a young boy, but a young woman at the time. Can you describe that in more emphatically? Because it goes right through.

She is very sure of her idea. She's very sure of her stance. I mean, as a 10-year-old, she berates the woman who's supposed to have brought her up and gives her a mouthful, as you would say. said, doesn't she? She stands up to Mrs. Reed and she says, speak I must. And that sense of a hard, indomitable inner self that cannot be conquered and that actually thrives on resistance is there right from the beginning. So it's an innate characteristic in Jane Eyre. And you see it playing its way out on these various agonistic encounters that she has with Mr. Brocklehurst and also with

Rochester itself. So it's actually strengthened by that opposition. I think there's also, as part of that in a character a burning sense of justice and injustice. And you get in the novel a lot of judicial and forensic metaphors and you almost get these mini trial scenes during the course of the novel. And again, I think that idea that not only does she have a strong sense of self and what is owed to her as a woman and as a person, but she seeks to establish that in the wider community. She's a highly, highly passionate woman. She falls deeply and very erotically in love with Rochester. At the same time, there's a sigh to her nature, and you see this very much when she's sort of talking to herself in the narrative that is very self-aware

and that seeks to place some rational parameters around everything that she feels. So she's very afraid of becoming, in the way that Rochester clearly was when he was a young man, overtaken by obsession, by emotion, by passion. And there's a voice insider that contains and controls. So that famous moment when she decides that she's not going to become Mr. Rochester's mistress, she is going to run away, you can say in some ways that's the conventional Janeair, who doesn't want to become a mistress if she can't become a wife, but it's also the side that says, I care for myself.

Do you have any idea? Dyn has talked about a couple of the early critics. Do we have any idea what the popular readerships are? Was she particularly taken up by women? Do we know the readership? Have we any evidence of that? We know the readership, and I think in gender terms, it was probably more mixed than it is today.

So that she was, Thackeray was very complimentary about her. So was Scott. A number of reviewers obviously were speculating about whether she was a woman or not, and a number of viewers were concerned that if she were a woman, there's something kind of slightly coarse and risque and dangerous about the novel. But I think it was a balanced readership,

and I think she struck a huge chord with all writers and readers who were interested in that defiant autobiographical voice. Remember that the subtitle of Jane Eyre is Jane Eyre an autobiography. As Diana mention, it was hugely popular. I mean, quite soon, she was able to set up as an independent novelist, getting on with

what you wanted to do is write more novel. She was, and I think she got £500 in total from her publisher for that first novel and she, after a short while, declared herself to her publisher and he tried to take around London parties incognito and she was introduced to Thackeray and various others. But that kind of fame didn't sit very easily with her. Right. So we have, Sarah Lise, we have the realism.

Low Wood is heightened realism, whatever, might be still realism, really enough to make you think, thank goodness. Anyway, all that stuff. But there's also a fantastical elements. There are dreams, there are visions, was that a ghost? Did he call to me in the middle of the night? should I go there, should I flee the home, all that sort of thing. Can you bring those two together?

Yeah. Well, I mean, sort of picking up on what Diana was saying a little bit about the kind of almost fairy tale gratifications of the narrative, the wish-fulfillment dimensions where the people Jane hates get punished, Jane herself gets what she wants, although what she wants is rather complex. You know, the extraordinary power of the novel, I think, is often rightly attributed to the way in which Bronte has kind of braided together the realistic and the fantastical or the realism and romance,

we might say, or realism and gothic romance. And the reason that has such power is because it shows how real Victorian social realities, whether it's the miseries of school or fitting like an outsider in the family or the drudgery of governessing and so on, might be experienced as Gothic nightmare or as fairy tale. You know, this is clearest in the midsection of the novel, where Jane persistently, and as does Rochester, in fact, speaks of her experience of falling in love with him

as this sort of unreal or fairy tale experience. precisely because she experiences the sort of the social elevation as this kind of, you know, vitiginous feeling, you know, how can I, I mean, a governess be sort of in this position to be marrying this glamorous aristocrat and so on? And all the way through this sort of,

the fantastical dimensions of Victorian social realities are sort of, I think, you know, is really key to the novel's power and why it has a sort of, enduring sort of realistic value as well as a sort of, you know, a mere kind of fairy tale quality. It's an immense gear shift, but we go along with the Pali, I think, because it's so grounded in a reality we can sympathise with because of the reality,

in the opening a novel. But then we're talking about dreams coming in the night, messages from her mother, her dead mother, and on it goes. So it's very, that comes in and we just take it as part of what is that. We don't say, oh, stop believing in this. Well, the strange aspect of the, you know, because it has this, I think, in some ways,

almost an quite aggressive eye voice, and yet people don't tend to experience the eye narration as claustrophobic. We go along with it for some reason. We're seduced by it, although, you know, notably some people, like, for example, Virginia Woolf, kind of bristled at the intensity of that eye voice. And I think that's also why the interpenetration of the realistic and the romantic in the novel has this persuasive force, too,

there's no way to stand outside Jane. There's no room for ironic distance or questioning her. We love who she loves and hate her. She hates all the way through. And she also has a kind of rationality in her too, although she's prone to certain kinds of hallucinations and visions. That's also, I think, what makes or it gives the kind of persuasive force to the more extreme or fanciful elements. Also, the interior thinking has a strong poetical.

quality. She's bringing into her prose ways of talking about life which have been not necessarily are very rarely in my reading very rarely in prose to that extent. Dina the relationship between Jane

and Mr Rochester first time she meets him he falls off his horse he dresses up as a woman sometimes well not sometimes once but it can be a comic figure he's rather unfortunate she's very tentative at first.

Can you tell us how that developed into such a powerful and long-lasting and memorable love of her? It's a very double and complex relationship because on the one hand, there is Rochester who has the power, has the wealth, he's the employer, and he is dark, strong and stern in that byronic model that Karen was mentioning. So it looks as though you're a...

in a very conventional masculine masculine power, feminine vulnerability structure. But from the very first, it's clear that you are not, because as you've mentioned, the first thing that Rochester does when he encounters Jane, after a rather fairy story entrance, on his dark horse with his giant hound in the twilight, he tumbles off his horse, hurts himself and has to be rescued. Jane manages him. She redeemed. Jane manages him. She redeemed. him, she brings him back to life, as, of course, he does her. So as that relationship moves through, you see a kind of balancing taking place. And when after the fire, the great fire at Thornfield, in which Rochester's first wife is killed,

Rochester emerges as this maimed and damaged creature loses a hand and is, of course, blind. Jane then returns to him and they have a relationship in which that power balance, which has always been there in the novel, is resolved in both physical and indeed financial terms, because at that point in the novel, Jane has achieved her financial independence. So it's a complex business, but going back to the point that Karen touched on earlier, the eroticism of the novel, which I think is immensely, powerful and is part of its appeal, not the time suggesting that it's a Victorian 50 Shades of Grey.

And nobody thought you were down, really, I can I assure you. Yeah. But there is an erotic drive and a charge in the novel. And I think it does have to do with that sharing of vulnerability and power in a kind of shifting power relationship. Jane calls Rochester Master, the first title of her first. novel. She persistently calls Rochester master

and yet there is a sense in which she achieves mastery of him and he says at one point you master me because you seem to submit. Karen O'Brien

in her early work there's a male narrative the professor and then in Jane she tells the story and that was Sarah's talked a little about this. Can you develop the power that that gives to the norm?

You're absolutely right. All of Charlotte Bronte's early experiments are with male narrative voices. So this is a dramatic transformation. It's important to remember that this is a narrator who's narrating at the age of around 30 looking back. Nevertheless the narrator takes us through this

compelling story without disclosing any of the secrets so that we're embedded in the narrative and there's no hint actually that who the true mad man in the attic is going to turn out to be. there is a clear sense, I think, in the early part of the novel, of a difference between an older woman looking back and a child trapped in this terrible world of Lowood School

in the early part of the novel. But as she goes through, this narrative voice develops and develops this kind of strength and this ability to absorb us entirely in the narrative. Having said that, I think it's important to say that there are other narratives in the novel. Rochester himself, on at least two very substantial occasions, gets to tell his story,

so that we're allowed to see his narrative of his early life and then later on he explains to Jane what happened in the Thornfield fire so we're allowed to juxtapose one kind of narrator who is searingly honest and self-aware in the form of Jane Eyre and another kind of narrator who's a little bit more playful has an emerging sense of maturity and redemption but nevertheless is not as fully self-aware and that's Rochester Sarah Lyme, Bertha Mason the brother the mad woman in the attic is Roger

has married her for her wealth. He was, sank in Sankey, wouldn't inherit the estate. And the idea that she's presented as being deranged, somebody could be kept away, somebody to be kept away, somebody's a complete disturbance. And she's painted very, I was going to say black, let's keep that word, in all sorts of ways,

because an imperialistic colonial thing enters into it and so on. Some people think that Charlotte Bronte has been very cunning in trying to make her as not only frightening as a woman, but as terrible as a person, so that it'll be easier for Jane how to sort of marry, accept marrying her husband. Yeah, I mean, certainly I think that there is the logic that Bertha must be unredeemable

so that Rochester may be redeemable. She's really a wholly demonised figure in the novel, a sort of Gothic, figure of Gothic monstrosity. And in fact, it's actually quite hard to form it. a clear picture of Bertha in some ways because the novel just invokes so many kind of, you know, terms for her. She's a vampire, a goblin, a hyena, a dog, a bird of prey. It's just this sort of zoological list of monstrosity, basically. I also often prefer to simply as an it as if she, you know, didn't sort of somehow passed beyond gendered pronouns.

So the novel, I think, well, it's very hard to make sure that no readily sympathy can stray to ward Bertha, although Jane does have a moment where she questions, Rochester's lack of sympathy. It's a very brief moment though. And although Bertha's given a biography, she's not really given a psychology that we can enter into. It's because it's organized around a set of contradictions. She's both, and I think these contradictions are actually quite purposeful. They're trying to prevent readily identification with her. So on the one hand, she seems to be to blame for her madness. This is a suggestion that it's an effect of her sort of monstrous sexual appetites and her alcoholism. So she seems to

induced the kind of, you know, derangement of her reason through, you know, through a sort of immorality. On the other hand, it's suggested that it's this congenital phenomenon passed down through her mother's mind. So the sense that she is and isn't to blame for her madness is there. And also the actual, her actual interior life is very hard to get a sense of because on the one hand, it's, she's, there's a suggestion she's in some way intellectually deficient. She's referred to as an intellectual pygmy. She's said to have, um, and being imbasar. But yeah.

No, I'm dying. Just following on from that, I mean, Bertha is everything that Jane is not. Yes. And yet they're curiously connected. Yes. Those animal metaphors that you mention in relation to Bertha recur, particularly in the early stages of the novel,

in descriptions of Jane. You know, she's a bad animal, she's a mad cat, she is dangerous, she bites. Do you remember that scene where she bites John Reed, which kind of presages the biting later in the novel. So on the one hand, they're absolutely opposed. But on the other hand, you can almost see Bertha as a dark shadow of Jane herself. I didn't quite answer the question I asked, and probably it's the wrong question.

So if it's the wrong question, let's move on. But I'm going to ask it to your account. Do you think that Jane wanted to make Bertha so terrible that anything Rochester did was okay? In terms of the character, I think there is this kind of unconscious desire to supplant the first Mrs. Rochester and to become the second. I think there's also a sense in which for Jane Eyre herself, Bertha represents the dark underbelly of what Rochester himself is. So, you know, something that's out of control, something that's in this 19th century where I'm thinking contaminated by contact with the colonies and dirty money because, remember, this novel is set back in the early 19th century in the slavery era. So I think Jane Eyre is both afraid of what Bertha represents in terms of her own desires, but also actually in terms of what they might be lurking underneath Rochester's character.

And the colonies, Sarah Lines brings us into a lot there really about it, but just a couple of things. One is that there's this dark person from the Caribbean who is, as you yourself have said, a large animal. The other thing, largely animal, the other thing is that Jainer's inheritance comes from the colonies, from investments that have been made over in the Collins. Now these two things are weighing with certain critics today saying, no, does this give us a completely different view

of what Janeair is as a person or what Charlotte Bronte is up to as a novelist? What do you think? Absolutely. I think Karen's word, this sort of logic of contamination is the crucial way to understand it. You can think of Jane Eyre as the novel as this, you know, a kind of early example of what sonnets referred to as imperial Gothic, where often the empire isn't directly represented,

presented but appears as a symptom in the metropole or appears as a kind of gothic haunting or and all of the engagements with the there is a kind of obliquity to all the engagements with colonialism as it goes on but but there are so many of them that they sort of start to add up and you know this is partly what's compelled you know modern critics to say sorry go ahead sorry car well I was just going to say I think I think that the contamination idea there's also sort of a decontamination so when the money finally comes to Jane it's actually in English investments. We're told that rather oddly and rather explicitly. And I think this plays out in terms of the idea of a kind of geography where Jane herself is associated with the healthy heart

of England, with sticking to English values and English geographies. And Mr. Rochester offers for the chance to go to the south of France and there's a sense of a hot geography that she's constantly repudiating. So there's a sense of, I think, colonial contamination, but also of decontamination and then restitution, restitution of the fortune to Jane and also to her. her English cousins. And even the sort of lots of aspects of Jane that seem, you know, fairly like standard Gothic heroin aspects, her smallness, her paleness and so on, her almost ghostliness come to signify as a kind of, to Rochester at least, is this kind of purifying Englishness

by the end of the novel. But within the doubleness. Can I just ask you, can we move on? Because there's quite, there's so much to discuss. I don't want to miss out this religion. Some people thought it was a very, it's a very religious point of view of something. Anti-religious, what's your view on that? I do think it's a religious.

novel, but it demonstrates religion of a very particular kind. It's intensely hostile to religious hypocrisy. We've already mentioned Brocklehurst as an example of that. And it is hostile too to the notion of the institutional power of the church. It's a Protestant model of religious experience that we are offered in Jane Eyre and it's closely allied to the old tradition of the spiritual, autobiography. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, an important novel to the children in the parsnage as they grew up, I think, is a vivid presence in Jane Eyre, that journey, that pilgrimage

through testing experiences. It's an inwardness of a relation with God. But it is a dynamic relationship which really guides Jane that she will be, and she says so explicitly at one point, she will be guided by the laws given by God and sanctioned by men. It's one of her motives for rejecting the prospect of becoming Rochester's mistress. But you could say, Karen O'Brien, at the point, at the picture point, where she is thinking of marrying St John and going to India, the voice of Rochester comes across the ether and says, he's in trouble, and she goes back to him. So that kind of love conquers religion.

It does But also I think religion The kind of religion that String Rivers embodies Is a religion of total self-denial A kind of brutal, ambitious denial of one's passion This is her cousin, the brother of the two sisters Have taken her in, yes This is the cousin, the man she subsequently discovers

as her cousin who is this missionary who's characterised as cold to her hot. So I think the idea of a religious sensibility that's enabling, that allows you to flourish is very important to Charlotte Bronte, the idea of a religious sensibility, which is about self-denial, and translates in that way into a sort of persecution of others, is not attractive to her.

It is worth remembering. I think that's absolutely right about St. John Rivers he's seen as, in a sense, one of the male tyrants. But the conclusion of the novel, its final page, which is odd, takes you back to St John Rivers. And in a sense also remind you of Helen Burns, someone we haven't mentioned, the girl at Lowwood who had a kind of self-denial,

which is parallel to St John Rivers. Exactly. Yes, that's right. But St. John Rivers has the final words in the novel. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. It's a biblical reference. And it's a curious echo of that moment where Rochester and Jane communicate.

It's St. John Rivers communicating with Jesus. And the final word of the novel, is actually Jesus. So it's such a double novel, this. So on the one hand, that very self-denying, you might say life-denying model of religious experience offered by rivers is rejected by Jane Eyre.

But on the other hand, she concedes its power. Is there more to say about the colonial pickup, particularly when we're thinking of Jean Reese's, Sargasso-C committed in 1966, which is a story of Bertha, really, as it were, an attempt to put that side of it. What did that bring to studies of Jane Eyre? Well, it's a remarkable novel,

not least because it's a rare instance where you have a kind of novel that's a, you know, a reworking of a prior text that actually, in some ways, almost seems to re-inhabit the first text and make you, it's very hard once you've read Wides-SocC to expunge it from your experience of J-N-Ear. It's a very strong, both imaginative and critical response to the novel, and in particular in giving a voice to Bertha Mason

and who's renamed Antoinette Crossway in that novel has I think, you know, it's alongside a very famous critical reading of the novel The Mad Woman in the Attic by feminist critics from the 1970s Susan Gilbert and I'm going to say Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guibar is the correct order have both made the sort of scapegoating of the Mad Woman in the Attic a really key part of our understanding. June Reese was herself from Dominica and she identified with the figure of the white Creole woman.

And that novel really does, in some sense, give us almost a kind of Jane Eyre-like experience of the Mad Woman of the Attic. We understand her experience of emotional privation and so on. But that spins it out into a wider, begins to be a global readership, partly because of the connections there, don't you agree? It does spin it out into a global readership

and it's been reprised in so many ways. I'm very interested in the Jane Campion film from 1993, The Piano, which is a story of a woman who emigrates to New Zealand. And I think that idea of the colonial story, in this case, of a woman displaced and courageous in an unfamiliar setting, it's just part of that ongoing global transmission of Janeair. I can't do this program. I mean, there's so much quotable in the book.

But perhaps the most famous line is that the opening line of the final chapter, Reader I Married Him. you've got very short time Iechapu to say how that strikes you as a sentence starting with you It's important that it's not the last line of the novel It's the first line of the concluding chapter I think she gets away with it Because there's a slightly ironic sense of romantic inevitability

It also shows us in charge But exactly what's important is that I married him Not that we got married It's also important that it begins Reader I Married Him Because at this point You really do have a close and personal relation With Jane Eyre

You are addressed as the reader. It's a triumphant moment. No one forgets it. And yes, it confirms, you know, Jane's status as the sort of Cinderella figure, the Victorian governess made good. Well, I'm afraid we've got to go now. There's another programme. Oh, no, no, no.

Thank you very much at Dinah Birch, Karen O'Brien and Sarah Lyons. Next week we'll be talking about extremophiles and astrobiology. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I wish we'd had time to say something about the various adaptations of film versions, which is so fascinating. To talk about Tony's The School in particular. Orson Wells is a Rochester.

Yes, that was my first Rochester, Austin Wells. But the thing I always feel about those adaptations, going back to, I think you were talking about this, so how important it is that Jane is playing. And so few, you can see why, so few directors and producers have the correct. age to default. They're always always pristive. She's always too pretty.

It's like the librarian behind the glass. Yes. And it's also too that Jane isn't there. But you're beautiful. But they normally resist that ugly duckland logic of transformation, right? Jane doesn't get a makeover in the book. She remains sort of strangely loyal

to her sort of plain governance. And if you have a tall Jane in a film, it won't do. Her tiny size. You can't see her anyway. I see her. Casting directors. but if anybody in the next film, Jenner, will you please call?

Simon Tillerson, and he'll put you on to the contributors to this Monish programme, and they'll solve all your casting problems. Well, you can see why it's so tempting to have some gorgeous feminine creature in the role, but it does make such a different story of it. And too handsome, I mean, Rochester, she's constantly telling him how old he is. And that's important. We get these gorgeous men playing Rochester. And he's not allowed to be tall either.

Below middle height, that means short. He's sort of Napoleonic, isn't he? And one of St John Rivers's problems, indeed, Brocklehurst is also in the same category. They're tall, it's a very bad thing. Bad to be tall? Yes. In Charlotte Bronte's fictional world, it is bad to be tall. Do you think it's because she doesn't like to look up to anybody?

She's redressing the balance. She was very small. She's just redressing the balance. She does suppose of anybody who seems too well fed as well, all the way through all the novels, there's this real sort of emphasis upon. I mean It's all Hunger theme

is really strong in the novel and connected with the kind of one thing I like you about Lowood which I hadn't remember when you read again much I mean I was right 40, 50 years before last time but I've forgotten

that she does bring in the business of the bigger girls pinching the smaller girls food so the little they had was much reduced that yes that's right it is heartbreaking

yes that's that's a strike to more than anything so she's got this and then later she's I tried to eat this. Then a few paragraphs on that she mentions that even the little they had was stolen by the bigger girls.

But another thing we didn't have time to talk about was Roe Head, where of course she spent much longer than she did at the clergy daughter's school, run by Miss Waller and her three sisters. And that was really quite a happy experience for her. She made lifetime friends, Ellen Nussie, the fiery Mary Taylor.

It was a very remarkable story in her own writer, actually, Mary Taylor's story. And there she at first acquired independence. She didn't much enjoy being a teacher there. But she taught there for more than three years. She earned her own money. And if you read the diary, you get this sense of the imaginative groundwork of Jane Eyre. On the one hand, she's kind of bemoaning teaching.

And then on the other, she's sort of going into this fantasy world. And you would see that she has that insight. What if I include the frame of the discontented teacher or the discontented government? She was quite naughty as an editor- Simon-Tillison is trying to get in here to make his announcement. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.ukau-Uk slash Radio 4.