Jane Eyre 1: passion, madness, gaslighting and bad hair days

[Music] You're listening to the Secret Life of Books. With Sophie G and John T. Clapeau. This episode, Charlotte Bronties' Jane Eyre. Sophie, we always like to start with a reading to give a flavor of the text, but this reading is probably the shortest reading we'll ever do, and it's some of the most famous words in literature, so no pressure. Gosh, I'm a bit intimidated. This is a big one, because in my view, you can put the emphasis on any word. You really putting me on the spot, John T. All right, I'm going in. Reader, I married him. Very good. Where'd you put the emphasis? I don't think I put any. Because you can do reader, I married him. Yeah, reader, I married him. I mean, in hindsight, that's the most two here, isn't it? You married, you did what? I've always wanted to do a rewrite of Jane Eyre. Reader, I divorced him. Yes, this is equal. There's no idea. There's a very remarkable fiction, either. Okay, anyone listening out there? Takers. Okay, so those are four of the most famous words in the history of the novel. They come from Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronti and published in 1847. It is, in brief, the story of an orphan girl who becomes a governess in a large home and falls in love with the master of the house, Mr. Rochester. He falls in love of her too. There is one obstacle. He is already married to a mad woman who has kept in the attic of the house. Jane and her further trials, but ultimately, get her happy ending. So on the surface, it seems like another marriage plot, the marriage plot being that well-established format of literature. The big 19th century novel thing, isn't it? The marriage plot. But Jane Eyre is so much more than that. How did you find rereading it, Sophie? I loved rereading it. I loved it. I went in feeling a bit jaded thinking, "I know what happens in Jane Eyre. I'm not going to get much out of this, but I was completely one over. It's so passionate. It's so strange." And you just said there that he's already married to a mad woman who's kept in the attic of the house. It's one of the most audacious, just crazy narrative moves that anyone had made in literary history, I think. I mean, I can't think of another text before that, which has such a "whoa out of left field plot device." And when the mad woman appears as well, she doesn't pull her punches. It's not somebody who's wearing a napkin on their head saying "I'm a bit mad." No, and she's not shivering in the corner. She's out there with her knife and her candles. All fours, like an animal. It is really terrifying when it happens. Anyway, so I loved it. I love the oddness of it, and I love the passion of it. It's about the development of a woman's soul, and it gives voice to the underdog. Jane Eyre is coming from behind. She's had a really unfortunate early life. And in that respect, Jane Eyre is a landmark in Firmness' thought, and has been recognized as such for decades, for centuries, even. It's full of psychologically complex characters. It's touching on a lot of themes of empire and colonialism, even though it's set in Yorkshire. So it's abolitionist. It's anti-colonial in a certain way, but it's also complicit with colonialism. That, for me, is actually one of the most interesting things about the book. It's just deeply weird. It picks up on all the big things that novels were doing before then, and then it's transforming them. But, you know, if you want to think about what were the big landmark novels before Jane Eyre in the few decades beforehand, it would be Austin's novels. It would be things like Frankenstein. Brontie's clearly working with that stuff, but she's changing it. What was about for you? I loved rereading it, too. And because of that, we've decided we're going to split this into two episodes, because there's so much to get into both with Jane Eyre, but also with Charlotte Brontie's life. In fact, these episodes on Jane Eyre are just the first and the longer series we're doing about the Bronties. That's very exciting. It's almost impossible to look at Charlotte's life in isolation without the broader context of her sisters, Emily, and so after Jane Eyre, we're going to look at Emily Brontie's "Wuthering Heights", and Brontie's "The Tenant of Wildfell" whole. And we're going to be asking what exactly was going on in the parlour of their family home at Howarth Passenage to result in three of the greatest novels of all time being published within a year of one another? It's just unbelievable, isn't it? As a student of mine once said to me, speaking about four corners, five great novels, she said, I mean, I don't even think I could have written one of those. It's one of those inexplicable phenomena. So actually, were you to have written one of the Bronties novels, which novel you? Well, one wants to be "Wuthering Heights", doesn't one, but. One does. "Wuthering Heights", does one? It's so weird. I think I'm "Tenant of Wildfell" whole. I'm going, Jane Eyre. You're Jane Eyre, okay. Yeah, I would have written Jane Eyre. As always in a secret life of books, we're looking for the untold story behind Jane Eyre, because books are the public expression of private thoughts, private experiences, and books are also the expression of what's going on historically and intellectually behind the scenes. So in that spirit, before we get to Charlotte's life and how she came to write Jane Eyre, I just wanted to ask you Sophie about the significance of the book, in terms of that broader, literary history and tradition, because it was a huge success at the moment it was published. It was. It felt very fresh to reviewers and readers in 1847, but what was you about it? Yeah, it's a great question, Johnty. It's unusual for us to start with a critical significance of the book. We usually get to that later after doing the biography. But I think in the case of Jane Eyre, as the sentence that we read, "Reader, I Married Him" goes to show, its impact is enormous in terms of the way it changes the history of literature and its intervenes in the genre of the novel. So it's an intervention. You know, when I give my sort of cheat sheet account of what is a novel, a novel is a new literary technology intended to be read in private, so it read alone, it's not like a play, that gives us a way in to the inner lives of an individual person and shows us how people have intimacy and share their inner lives with others. So that, for me, is what a novel does. It does lots of other things, but that's the core of it. By the time Bronti's writing Jane Eyre, the novel, as we know it, the novel in English, is about a century old. Austin's written her big novels, which themselves are sort of assembling and consolidating all the things that have happened across the early history of the novel. And Bronti picks that ball up and runs with it. And there's a frank admission of violence, which is very new with the very first scenes of the book, involved the child Jane being subjected to both psychological and literal violence. The pivotal scene of the novel in the red room is a literalisation of the psychological landscape of Gothic narrative, which has been happening in the half century before Bronti's writing. The red room is where the young Jane Eyre is sent when she's perceived to have been naughty, and she's locked in this room. She has a terrifying experience, she thinks it's haunted. It's a moment of psychological torture. It's very enclosed, there's a lot of drapery and wall hangings, and she imagines that Mr. Reed, the father of the household, her uncle actually, that Mr. Reed's ghost is watching her. She's already quite abused and tortured from her experience living with her cousins, but the idea that this ghost is in the room just tips her over the edge, and she completely freaks out. So the thing that really feels so fascinating to me about the opening scenes of Jane Eyre, which is set in Jane's childhood, is that it's written like a Gothic novel, but it's firmly lodged in the domestic. It's firmly lodged actually in the slightly sort of uptight, scoldy settings of a children's book. It's school rooms and tea and going out for walks. And in the 100 years of the novel, so that point is that. I suppose it's psychological violence you're describing as much as physical violence. So the psychological violence comes from the Gothic novel. Okay, so that has been in the novel before. This is Radcliffe. Well, the castle of a tranto, the mysteries of your dolphin, that kind of stuff. But you're saying what's new in Jane Eyre is bringing that into a realist domestic space? Yes, exactly. So I think what's been interesting about the Gothic novel in the late 18th century, those examples that I just cited, is that they imagine ghosts and hauntings and all sorts of things. But almost always it turns out that there's a very rational ordinary explanation for what they're seeing. And Bronti's genius is to kind of turn that around. What Bronti's telling us as the readers is that this is the Gothic writ large. That they're actually is a kind of profound terror. And in that sense, it sort of anticipates, I think, something like Henry James is the turn of his crew. Yes, great book. And I wonder whether he deliberately did that. You mentioned in your intro that Jane Eyre shows us the evolution of a woman's soul from childhood to adulthood. And I've seen that said about Jane Eyre in other places as well, and it's true. Is that a new thing? I'm not aware of whether that's new or not so thing, and I presume you are. I think it might be the first version that we really get of that idea. I mean, if you think, for example, about Pride and Bridgness, which is always my sort of ground zero novel, where we do have the sense that Elizabeth and Darcy are meant to be with one another, Austin really complicates that idea right from the start. They're actually not soulmates, they hate each other. They don't get together until Elizabeth sees that Mr. Darcy's house is really enormous and kind of awesome. But again, change that, isn't it? Yeah, that's a big one. If you see somebody's house and it's big and awesome, you know that's. Change your mind. Yeah. To be Mr. Sopembley might. be something. There's not that move in Jane Eyre at all. There is this sense that their souls are reaching out to one another across class, across gender, across all sorts of social taboos, including the taboo that Mr. Rochester's got someone living in his attic, although, of course, Jane doesn't know that. There's an unstoppable sense of connection between them, and that gets kind of literalized at the end of the book when Jane hears Mr. Rochester calling to her. Jane, Jane. Jane. Jane. As he's burning to a crisp in his large house. I hadn't really thought about this before, but it exactly inverts that Pemberley thing from Jane Austen. Elizabeth doubles down on Mr. Darsie when she sees Pemberley, Jane doubles out on Mr. Rochester when he's house burns down. Yes. In fact, the house is the obstacle. Once the house is burnt down, they can finally be together. Yes. It's not just because he's first wife's out of the way. Yes. But there's something about the house that's impediment to their union. So that's an inversion. And also something that really struck me reading it is she proposes to him. Is that a first? Is this the first time a woman has taken that initiative and proposed to a man in literature? So that one I think it might be. It's not the first time there have been two proposal scenes in a novel. So Jane here has two proposal scenes. The first one where Mr. Rochester proposes, and I want to come back to that in one second, and then there's the sort of redo after his house burns down. He's blind. He's named by his experiences in the fire. And Jane really takes power back from the man. So Rochester has dictated the terms of the first proposal, which was in a garden. And the garden is figured as being kind of like Eden in the first proposal, which is on the grounds of Thornfield, Mr. Rochester's big house. The proposal is figured as a redo of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost or in the Bible for that matter. I mean, Rochester literally tells Jane that he feels like there's a string coming out of his rib and connecting to her. It's an amazing image that it's. Yes. Yes. So it's also quite awkward. I'm going through married life with a string connecting you. Yeah, to your ribs together. Yeah, be quite hard to go to the Lou and stuff. It's a very unsexy thing. Yeah, it's not. It's so tight when you're about to propose. Yeah, and there's a lot of not-hard in that scene. You can talk about the house more. Can I please see your last three tax returns? So is there the first version of the proposal? Mr. Rochester's completely in charge. It's like Eden. It's like a do-over of let's say Paradise Lost. And there's a string connecting them through their ribs. In the second version of the proposal, Jane herself is in charge. She has actually become independently wealthy by that point in the novel. Her husband to be has been crippled by a fire, which was started by his ex-wife, a gutsy daring piece of narrative maneuvering on Brontis part. So Jane, it takes hold of things at the end of the novel. Okay, so there's nothing more annoying than having oneself quoted back at oneself. But I saw you a few weeks ago at Sydney Riders' Festival giving a talk on the 18th century novel. And you said at the end of that rather flippantly, but you mentored as well that by the time Jane Austen has finished her of everything that the novel can do has been done. And so you're implying everything after there is a replay of things set in motion. So how do you feel about that now having reread Jane? It is true that I made the claim at the Sydney Riders' Festival before I reread Jane. It is also true that I was ad-libbing in front of a large. Searching for provocative things to say. Yeah, however, I'm actually going to stick to my guns. I think that Austin did all the major innovations that the novel ever needed. And we'll talk about that when we do our episodes on Jane Austen. But interestingly, Brontis, she's on record actually sort of saying that she doesn't really read Jane Austen. She's not really interested in her. But there is, she gets caught red handed. There's a letter that she writes about Jane Austen. And she describes Austen as a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers. But no glance of a bright, vivid, physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no Bonnie Beck, which is a great quote. And Bronti, she rips down the fences and she pulls out the borders. She turns Austen's nicely manicured garden landscapes into a wild Yorkshire, more, and mountain scape. And that's obviously what Bronti intends us to take away from that remark. But she's also showing us what's so innovative about Austen because Austen's novels for all their careful fences and high cultivation have the elements that Bronti needs. Yeah, and she's also acknowledging, I guess, that Austen has said everything in place, put up the fences. And you can rip that, but there's still Austen's fences. Hardly. I mean, to finish on the romantic side of Jane Eyre, which I think is a little bit of a departure from Austen's novels. The language of passion in Bronti is new. So, for example, when Rochester proposes to her in the rib scene, the garden scene, he says, "My bride is here because my equal is here. Jane will you marry me?" And that's quite interesting and quite new. He's saying that they are equals because they're soulmates, even though they're completely divided by wealth and status and even education. And Jane says, "Back to him, I have as much soul as you as full as much heart. If God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you." She says that when she has to head out because he's going to marry someone else. It's a really passionate cry. And the fact that Bronti is giving those heartfelt, very vulnerable raw words to a female character is hugely important. You don't hear those kinds of explicit protestations in Austen. A very passionate character in Austen would be Anne Elliott in persuasion who feels that way about Frederick Wentworth or even Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who sort of feels that way about Edmund Bertram, but they wouldn't say it aloud. And Bronti goes the extra mile and has them say it. The other thing I'll just mention about Mr. Rochester and the language of romance is that he in many ways adopts a sort of feminine position, unlike an Austen hero. Mr. Rochester is extremely emotional. There's a moment when Jane has to head out because she realizes that he's already married. And Mr. Rochester flings himself onto a sofa and bursts into uncontrollable sobs and says, "Oh, Jane, my hope, my love, my life." You know, that's not how a Victorian gentleman is supposed to speak. No, and his whole strategy is very unmanly in the Victorian sense. He's playing hard to get. He goes through a very elaborate process of pretending to be in love with someone else to make Jane jealous. I mean, it's so convoluted. And it's not the Victorian male striding out with determination to seize the woman he loves. It's not purposeful. It's a coquettish one might say Mr. Rochester. He is a Victorian coquette. No, I love that nature. It's true. John, you've been looking at Brontie's life, which both mirrors and departs from Jane Eyre. How does Brontie get to Jane Eyre? Okay, the story of the Brontie is so fascinating. Jane Eyre is not, of course, an autobiography, but it does track alongside Charlotte Brontie's life in many fascinating ways. And it has many autobiographical elements as well. And interestingly, when it was published, she had called it Jane Eyre a noddle. And the publisher said, "Why don't you call this Jane Eyre an autobiography edited by?" And Charlotte Brontie accepts it. She decides to go through it. And I think one of the reasons why she does decide to go through it is that in her heart she doesn't believe it's that deceitful to claim it's autobiographical. That's interesting. She's also picking up on something about 18th century novels, which is they often claim to be the true story of the character's life. But I think what you're saying, which is interesting, is that in the case of Jane Eyre really is pretty autobiographical. I mean, the starting point of Jane Eyre is that Jane Eyre is an orphan. Charlotte Brontie is not an orphan, but she has lost her mother very, very young. So just to roll back, her father, Patrick Prontie, he was called. He was a. Brontie isn't kind of a face saver. It's a rebrand. He comes from a poor Irish family and he's an intellectual prodigy and a spotted and eventually ends up in Cambridge. And through a series of maneuvers, he shifts his name so that Patrick Prontie, which I think he knows is not a name that's going to bleed to any greatness. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontie. She changes it to Brontie and then finally he settles on Brontie. And the reason why he chooses Brontie is that Nelson, Lord Nelson, after I think Bath of the Nile was awarded in a state on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. And it's called the Brontie estate. So he changes his name to this very heroic title. So now an eco-terismo boutique wine hotel. Biographers make a great deal of the fact that apparently Brontie in Greek means thunder. How else could the Brontie girls, Charlotte and Emily be? Their very name is thunder. So he changes his name to Brontie and he becomes curious of a very small village in the Yorkshire malls. It's very windswept and moorish. Readers of weathering heights will know the landscape. He's- Listeners to Kate Bush. Listeners to Kate Bush. Yes, out on the world on windy malls. He's a curate. He writes poetry. He is by all accounts an eccentric man with his own strain of violence. There are stories that when he gets in a rage, he would march outside and fire his pistols off into the back garden to release his temper at an anger. Although- Yes, they're probably apocchewal, but they're nice stories. - Amazing. - He marries a woman called Maria and they have six children together, five girls, one boy. But then when Charlotte is only five, comes the first great traumatic event in her life, which is her mother dies. And not in a neat 21st century way. It's a very drawn out Victorian death. It takes her eight months to die, - Oh, I said. - which she's removing herself from her children. So the children increasingly cut off over eight months. - How incredibly sad. - The children, very young, Charlotte's five, all the others, they're all born a year apart. They are, from this moment, thrown upon one another for support and comforts. And there's a story recalled by their nurse, later in life, remembered them, struggling about the morals, together as a group led by the eldest one, who is also called Maria age seven. It does raise the question, what the nurse was doing. I mean, surely your role as a nurse is to nurse the children. - Right, not sit around watching them struggling on the morals, commenting on how sad it is, they're struggling about on the morals without a guardian. - Yeah, good catch, basically. - So something needs to be done with the children. And Patrick, the sides, has sent the elder skulls to the clergy daughter's school in Cowan Bridge. It's a new school for daughters of poor clergymen. - Right, doesn't sound very fun. - It's not. And it is absolutely verbatim the model for the lowered school in Jane Eyre, which provides us harrowing early chapters of the book. - Oh, yeah, that's really grim. - And I mentioned that when Jane Eyre was published, her publisher asked her to call it an autobiography. - Interestingly, they also suggested that she toned down this section of the book that it was too grim, and she refused saying that it's true. - And also probably, you know, there's a social impact side to Charlotte Bronti too, isn't there? She wants the world to know what these sorts of institutions and these sorts of experiences are like. She's got an activist streak. - Yes. - And Dickens is doing Nicholas Nicolby and Oliver Twist around the same time, of course, as well. So there is a moment where these writers are exposing the absolute awfulness of the educational system, particularly for poor children. Cowan Bridge is run by a ghastly evangelical philanthropist called William Cyrus Wilson. And he is the model for Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, who runs lowered school. - There's that early scene, isn't there, where Mr. Brocklehurst is summoned by Jane Eyre's guardian, Mrs. Reed, because she wants to get Jane off her hands. Mrs. Reed is the mean stepmother type figure, although she's Jane's aunt, my marriage. And we know straight away that Jane's time at Lowewood is going to be absolutely miserable. There's this iron in the heart moment where Mr. Brocklehurst says to this tiny child, Jane Eyre, he says, "I have a little boy younger than you who knows six psalms by heart. And when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread nut to eat, or a verse of a psalm to learn," he says, "Oh, the verse of a psalm, angel sings psalms," says he. "I wish to be a little angel here below." He then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety. psalms are not interesting, I remarked. - Ha, so great response by Jane. And the real Mr. Brocklehurst, William Cyrus Wilson, he published a magazine called "The Children's Friend," which is anything but a friend to children. It's full of cautionary tales in which God strikes a child dead mid-tanchor. - Oh, wow. - And a girl applauds the teachers for whipping them, crying, "It is because they love us. God would be angry with them if they did not whip us." - So this is grim, grim Victorian moralizing. And he writes a book called "A Child's First Tales," where the stories are called things like "Mother Dead" and "Dead Boy." And we've talked about-- - I'm wondering if there's space in the YA market or the middle school reading market to bring some of this stuff back to you, but how would it go? - Yes, I think "Dead Boy" is right for the readers. - For every right by the guy who wrote the demon dentists, - Seriously? - The interesting thing we were talking a while back about Alice in Wonderland, and it's precisely this sort of dreadful moralizing children's stories that Lewis Carroll was reacting against when he writes and publishes Alice in-- - Yes, you're right. But what do you think Brondie's attitude to it is? Does she think childhood has a moral? Or do you think she has takes quite a moral vision of childhood? - So interesting, isn't it? She throws in later in the novel, of course, the character of "Singian." It turns out to be her long-lost cousin, who is a very, very evangelical preacher who's going off to be a missionary. - It's massively uptight missionary. - Charlottes or Jane at least is on his side to a degree. - Yes, the correction of childhood. Childhood is a moment to lay down a moral map. And then it comes up in the Lowwood School sections too. Helen Burns is an extremely moral child, but will come to Helen too in a moment. You're telling us about Cowan Bridge, the real-life Lowwood, and presumably they didn't get much to eat. - Oh, William Cyrus Wilson seems to spend far too much time writing stories like Mother Dead to be paying attention to the quality of the school. He-- - Well, who can blame him? - In that 19th century spirit, he believes the school, especially a school for semi-impoverished young girls, should be a Spartan place, it should be cold, there should be enough food, the children should be outdoors most of the time. And there are those bits and Jane air about Lowwood School, which could only have been written by somebody who went to such an institution. I'm thinking of that image where Jane describes the perpetual coldness and the way that the larger older girls would hog the bench in front of the one fire. And she talks about the smaller girls, the younger girls at the back, wrapping their starved arms inside their pinnifles. And that's written by somebody who's spent a lot of their childhood wrapping her arms inside her pinnifles. - Inside her clothes. And it's easy, I suppose, for us now to dismiss that as the cliches of Victorian literature, the way-flight children and the physical discomfort and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but actually to think about what those places must have been like is outbreaking, really cold, and nowhere near enough to wear-- I mean, I was a bit chilly this morning, and we had the heating on, you know? - Yeah, I know accountability. So you have a complete maniac, like William Cyrus Wilson, who is just a god deciding the lives and fates of these young girls. - The ineffect is one of the many child abusers in this novel. - What's about to happen is to second great trauma in Charlotte's life. Because the girls at Karen Bridge School are all essentially malnourished, they're cold, they're immune systems are low, is that disease rips through the school just as it does in lowered school, in Jane Eyre. And when Charlotte is nine, her two older sisters at the school, Maria, named after their mother, and Elizabeth, become very sick, like a number of the other girls, and they die within a few weeks of one another. It's another moment of great trauma for the Barney household, and they use the two elder daughters within a couple of weeks. And Charlotte turns this experience into the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Helen Burns, who you're not such a big fan of. - Well, now I feel bad. You know, when-- (laughing) Now you've said it about-- - Yeah, pick on the dead girl so quickly. - You said me of, John T. Yes, when I reread it, I did think she landed on a bit thick. Helen is a massive goody-to-shoes. She's grateful for her abuse. She's grateful for her discomfort. When I did think, oh, come on. But what I now realize is that Rante is asking her readers, just as Dickens was, to properly inhabit this terrible social wrong that was going on, and to try to do something about it. - Yeah. - There's a kind of moral further to it. - There actually makes me rethink that. - When Helen dies when Jane creeps down to her room. - Oh, it's so sad. - And Helen dies in her arms. - Yes, she cradles her in her arms. - Yeah. - And I was tempted to be cynical about that and think that there was a little bit of-- - Victoria and Meladrama. - Victoria and Meladrama, or Childa Rotisism, which is another strain in Victoria and Literature. But perhaps it's a deep expression of grief and sympathy on Jane's part for her lost sisters. - Yes. - Wishing that she could cradle them in her arms. - Charlotte's part. - I do mean Charlotte. Yes. - So in the book, Charlotte has Jane Eyre at lowered for eight years. - Yes. But Charlotte herself gets out of Cowan Bridge. Her father pulls her out, not surprisingly, having lost two of his daughters to it. And she spends the next eight years mostly homeschooling, although sometimes attending other schools. And this is where that incredibly tight bond between the children is strengthened. Because Charlotte, Branwell, who's the son, Emily and Anne, they're reading at home, they're studying art, they're reading God of his travels. Yes, we love God of his travels. They love the Romantics, they have access to Byron, which-- - Are they Child Harrel, or Don Jew and do you think? - Well, I don't know, which would be-- - Probably Child Harrel. - Probably Child Harrel. So they're getting that love of big emotions from the Romantic poets. And they also start to develop their own imaginative worlds. And this is-- - Well, that's very Gulliver's travels, isn't it? So we did an episode on Gulliver's travels, and we talked about the weirdness of Jonathan Swift inventing these imagined worlds. Now I'm thinking about the impact of Gulliver's travels on Charlotte Bronti and Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre herself has that slight quality of-- not being able to say the thing, which is not. She's incredibly direct. - She's like a winner. Yeah, from Gulliver. But also just the business of imaginative worlds. and make up lands. So it's very swift. Yes, it starts when Branwell decides to share his toy soldiers. He turns them into communal toys for all his siblings to play with. Nice. And they play act with them as famous real heroes, like Wellington and Bonaparte. They cast themselves like the gods in Homer. And these stories increasingly become fantastical and separate from reality and real characters. They have characters called the Duke of Zamorna, whose Duke of a country called Angrier. There are places called Glass Town, Verdopolis. They make maps of this world they're creating. And we know all about it because they write these tiny books, essentially for the toys it starts. But in the end, they're just writing them for themselves. These books full of stories of these imaginary characters, having their adventures. And I think you mentioned to me that one of the imaginary places was called North Fangirland. Now that's got to be a reference to Jane Austen, hasn't it, to North Fangirlaby. It makes me think about the way in which already Jane Austen's spoof on the Gothic novel was going through Charlotte and the Brontese minds. Yeah, that Gothic tone is in there. Yeah. And these male heroes, they have, they are a bironic figure. And there are a lot of Gothic elements as well to the stories. So you're quite right about that. I want to pull us into Jane Eyre for a second, because Charlotte at this time of her life is presumably becoming aware of what's going to be a dominant theme of Jane Eyre, that the rigidity of Victorian society can't accommodate the complexity of a woman's soul. This has to be dawning on her, not just during the Cowan bridge years, but in the years afterwards. We're told that Jane Eyre is quietness itself until she turns 10. And then she breaks out all fire and violence. That's when the Red Room episode happens. We're not told exactly why this happens, but presumably it's inspired by some sense of recognition on Jane's part that society has marked out for her a pretty terrible role. And she's been dealt a crap hand. She's an orphan girl without any physical charms. And it's part of the psychological astuteness of Bronti's novel, actually, that this is happening at the age of 10. I mean, my kids started getting quite sort of grumpy and voluptuous when they were about 10. We had to put them in the Red Room. Right. And did you? Yes. So Bronti's thinking through-- Did you send them to Cowan Bridge School? Well, whatever we could have. We did let them have meat, though. Maybe that was a mistake. Anyway, anyway. So Bronti's thinking through the developmental stage. It's not just of childhood, but also of adolescence. And there's that wonderful scene when the 10-year-old Jane tells Mrs. Reed exactly what she thinks of her. And these are words that it was very to do for a child, a female character to use, let alone in a novel. She tells Mrs. Reed that she's bad, that she's hard-hearted, that she's deceitful. And-- That's wonderful. And there's this amazing passage. Air, I had finished this reply. My soul began to expand, to exalt, with the strangest sense of freedom of triumph I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoved for liberty. Mrs. Reed looked frightened. Her work had slipped from her knee. She was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, even twisting her face as if she would cry. I mean, that's an amazing imaginative experiment on Bronti's part, that a child has that kind of power. I know it, because normally in Victorian novels, children go through all sorts of injustices. And when you're reading them, you're like, God, say, say something, stand, tell them what you really think. Yes, and Jane absolutely does. She does. You get the fantasy fulfillment, where she tells these characters exactly what the reader feels about them. Yes, and other characters in the novel don't pull their punches either. The servants, for example, in Gateshead, which is the house that Jane lives in as a little child. She overheads. He is a maid saying, if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her for lawness, but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that. I think this is another moment of Jane being avatars for Charlotte Bronti as well, because if you're Charlotte Bronti, wondering what you're going to do with your life when you grow up, in Victorian society, there aren't many options, open few, as we know. Your best hope is to marry well. All the evidences that Charlotte knew from a very young age that she wasn't a beauty. By her own accounts and others, she's very, very small. She has terrible eyesight. She's missing some teeth. And the family hasn't got much money. So she hasn't got much hope in making a favorable match. And that's why she's starting to wonder, what am I going to do with my life? Society has so few options for women. So like Jane Eyre, who after eight years have become a teacher at the school, Charlotte likewise at the age of 19 goes and becomes a teacher at Roehead School. And she hates being a teacher. She just fills her tiny little books with stories of Verdoleopolis that she sends back to her brother, Grandma. Oh, so they're still doing it? They're still doing it. And it's evolved into this vast order of the rings style fancy. Yeah, it's got a bit of Tolkien about it, doesn't it? There is a bit of-- And Charlotte writes about the experience. In one of her diaries, she's supposed to be teaching. And she writes, I long to write, the spirit of all Verdoleopolis, of all the mountainous north, of all the woodland west, of all the river-watered east. This is the world she's created. Came crowding into my mind. For non, yeah. But just then, a dalt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited. The thought came over me. I might have spent all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolic or most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oaves. She's talking about her students. Wow. That's amazing. I have a colleague who I teach with who describes the walk from your office to the classroom as the walk of death. And I feel like Charlotte Bronti is talking about the walk of death. Yes. So she hates children. She obviously hates teaching. She hates fat people. And you notice that. That's very unlikable cousin in the early parts of-- A John Reed. John Reed. He has thick lips. That's how we know that he's a bad man. And an awkward, sort of lumpish body. I think the other thing about-- at least Charlotte, about the other Bronti sisters-- is that she was a bit of a bore, I think, John T. I don't think she was a great company. There's this amazing story about William Makepiece Zachary, the man who wrote "Famility Fair," who was a big name in Victorian letters. She actually dedicates the second edition of "Jayne'er to Thackerie." And as a dinner party for her, when she finally comes to London after the "Jayne'er" has been this massive success, and she's the toast of the town. She comes to the dinner, and apparently she's so dull. She's so awkward conversationally, and all the guests are just so desperate, that Zachary actually sneaks out a side door and presses his finger to his lips in the corridor and puts his hat on and heads up to his club, because he just can't take the rest of the evening with his celebrity guest, Charlotte Bronti. Yes, she's a great Mona. She's incapable of looking at the bright side of anything. Yeah, but I feel a bit sorry for her being so physically awkward and physically unfortunate, apparently when she was famous, she was having a portrait done. And she felt incredibly self-conscious about having bad hair, every thin sort of weak hair. And bad hair, do you? I think she had a bad hair life, actually. And so she splashed out on a hair piece, basically a sort of Victorian hair extension. And she showed up to the sitting with this thing on her hair. Yes. Like a sort of cold ferret on her. Like a ferret. And but she had a bonnet on it. Apparently when she took her bonnet off, finally, for the portraitors that sprang back and all. Oh no. What is that thing in your head? Oh, that's very sad. Poor Charlotte. Oh no. And so she's at Roe Head School and she basically has a nervous breakdown. And so she's 19, she's back at home and really starting to worry about what she's going to do with her life. She does actually get one marriage proposal around this time. But it is not a marriage proposal anyone wants. OK. So what's wrong with it? Well, it's the brother of a friend of hers has become a priest. OK. He wants a wife in the way that all young Church of England priests do. And he just sits and works his way through his sister's friends and is turned down by them. And so there is a diary entry in which he writes, on Tuesday last, received a decisive reply from M.A.L.'s Puppa, a loss, but I trust a providential one. So he's been turned down. And then he just adds in his diary, wrote to her, "Your friend, C.B., which is Charlotte Bronte." So-- As it she's like number six. Yes, there is no passion. He's working his way through a list. He's got to Charlotte, not even first choice. Wow. So that has to be where Bronte got the scenes at the end of Jane Eyre from with the very uptight, very stiff, Shingen Rivers proposal to Jane, where he basically says, "I don't love you at all, but would you accompany me to a mission in India?" Because it's unsuitable for a man of God to appear without a wife. She sort of says, "Oh, go, but I'm just going to go on my own terms. I'll be your friend." And he'd know, no, we must be married. He has a kind of evangelical-- Yeah, he does. --mania. But this young curate who is the brother of a friend of hers, there's something just very wonderfully church of England and half-half of it. Yes, you're absolutely right. Yeah, furning it in. Well, of course, you're giving me. You've laid yourself wide open, John. Once again, you've given me a chance to hijack the episode with some intellectual history of really Oh God, are we going to get a digression on the history of the rest of the nation? I can't quite get to the reformation, but I will say that Syngens Christianity, yes, it's got that sort of puritanical Calvinist streak, doesn't it? It's not mainstream Church of England. Yes. He really, he has, he burns to convert. That's not what you're supposed to be doing in the Church of England. I feel I'm going to need to give you at some point just a podcast extra to do. And it can just be you on your own for like eight hours just saying everything you want to say about religion. I'm actually salivating as you say that. It would be so exciting. I find religious history unbelievably interesting. Yes, you'll never said it so outright and I'm glad of your honesty because it's crept into to our various conversations that I find religious history and could be interesting. Charlotte replies to this curate. What did she say? She says, I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you, but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. Oh, that's brilliant. It's a very good response. I think I'm going to put that into my auto reply. Yes, I have no personal repugnance to. Yeah. Mine is not sort of disposition that I'm definitely going to use that. There's a lot of Jane Eyre in that. And Jane generally is very dubious about marriage. And I think that reflects a prevailing and really very important attitude among women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is that marriage was a form of servitude. It was a kind of confinement and repression and Jane Eyre sensibly really doesn't think that it's for her. And then she falls in love. She falls madly and unexpectedly in love with her boss, Mr. Rochester. And there's the scene in Jane Eyre where Mr. Rochester in one of his sort of classic gas lighting moments, dresses up as a fortune teller, a kind of gypsy figure. And he shows up and he comes in and he's wearing a hood and like an apron and talking in a high voice and stuff. And he's. Yes, this is back to the Cockatish, Mr. Rochester. The Cockatish, Mr. Right, yes, he crossdress as he puts on women's clothes and he sits in his library and calls the women guests in the household in one by one and tells their fortune. And this is all that propose. Jane herself being quite resistant to marriage and not wanting to fall into the trap of that Victorian marriage plot, basically. Mr. Rochester, as the fortune teller says, "What tale do you like best to hear?" And Jane Eyre says, "Oh, I have not much choice. They generally run on the same theme, courtship, promise to end in the same catastrophe marriage." So marriage is catastrophe? The marriage plot is a catastrophe and so it turns out to be, in fact, in Jane Eyre as well. And then it's Jane herself who corrects it, who fixes it. What to me really stood out as I reread Jane Eyre this time is how, from the very start of her life, Jane sees as control of things. She's not a passive heroine at all. She refuses to be a textbook orphan, as we've seen. She tells Mrs. Reed exactly what she thinks of her and that that's very liberating. She becomes a teacher at Lowwood Hall, which in a way is a conformity to expectation, but she quickly gets sick of it. And she's actually very proactive and entrepreneurial. She places a job ad, she gets herself organised. She's like a sort of air tasker or a Uber driver. She's got the apps going. She's got the app going. She leans in, John T. And there's that famous passage in Jane Eyre, which I thought might be good to read here, which acts as a sort of manifesto, both for Jane's and I assume. Charlotte's way of thinking. So she says, "Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel. They need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts. As much as their brothers do, they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. And it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags." There's nothing wrong with puddings, by the way. Ornitting. I think she should have left puddings out. It's a great passage, but it's like, "Don't you like pudding?" Don't not puddings, Charlotte. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like a pudding. I had a big knitting phase, actually. Did you knit stockings? Not stockings, because they got a very tricky bit to knit the toe. Did you play the piano? I did. Did you? I like embroidering bags. It's quite new age, isn't it? Yeah, that is new age. So you've been talking about Jane Hustling and to come back to Charlotte. She's ended up back home. She's had her breakdown at Rowhead School. She's had this appalling marriage proposal. Yeah. She knows not that, which is what it. So she then hustles herself. She and Branwell her brother, they decide to write to two of the most famous writers in Britain at the time, asking for help with their writing careers. It's pretty bullsy. Charlotte writes to the poet, Laureate, Savi. And Branwell writes to Wordsworth. And Savi actually replies to his credit, although what he replies is "dispiriting." What does he say? She sends them some poems and he says she's got talent, but she shouldn't waste too much time on it. He says "literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be." Oh, Savi. Yeah, wow. I thought he was friends with Colouridge and. Well, he was, but they all the romantic poets became very conservative the older they got. Yeah, and they weren't good with their women, were they? They were better when they died young. So that's a knockback. Yeah. And so Charlotte decides just as Jane does that she's going to have to be a gov and s that the poet Laureate has told me not to waste my time writing. Yes, that's like Dryden telling Swift that he's never going to make a poet. Yes. They both had the last laugh, didn't they? They did. Charlotte, Rondy V. Robert Savi. Yes. And she's not going to marry Mr. Priest, who's worked his way down to her on a long list. No way. Is it the case that Charlotte actually ends up sort of marrying someone at the very end of her life and embroidering bags and making tea and having a pretty ordinary domestic existence? Well, she ends up very happy. Oh, happy. Right, that's the word. Yes. Yes. If she finds her true purpose, which is embroidering bags and. And making pudding. Yes. Regret all the things she said earlier in her career about this more to life. That was only an waste of my time on Jane Eyre. I know, I do quite want to come back and do a vallet and look at the last bit of Charlotte Bronty's life after everyone's died because she is happy for a couple of years. Yes. And I feel. And I know, bloody wonder, I mean those Bronties, they would have been tough to live with, wouldn't they? Really tough. So she becomes a governess, just like Jane. Yes. And Charlotte goes to work for the Sidjwick family in nearby Loversdale for a seven-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. She quickly realises that she hates being a governess almost as much as being a teacher. And she rails against the loss of mental liberty. And she writes to her sister, Emily, "I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence. Is not considered as a living and rational being, except as connected with the wearer-ism duties she has to fulfill. While she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. If she steals a moment for herself, she is a nuisance." So Jane air experiences that same restlessness when she becomes the governess of the quite charmless Adele at Thornfield Hall. Jane is very aware of the strange, interstitial life that she has as a governess. She is neither a regular servant in the household nor is she a member of the family. Governors don't have a place, basically, in Victorian society. And in the same way, I think that the scenes at Lo would haul could only have been written by someone who has experienced the institution of a Victorian boarding school for the impoverished children of clergymen, so too the scenes of the governess's life at Thornfield could really only have been written by someone who had experienced it firsthand. Do you remember that scene where Jane is invited to join a party of house guests after dinner? She has to wait for the women in the drawing room. It's a very interesting scene describing that sort of interstitial social role in Victorian society that I think Bronti's carving out for Jane in a very purposeful way to show readers how few the options were for someone like that. And how remarkable Jane is to get beyond the role that's assigned to her. Jane says, as the women come into the drawing room after dinner, there were but eight, yet somehow as they flocked in, they gave the impression of a much larger number. Some were very tall, many were dressed in white. I rose and curtsy to them, one or two bent their heads in return. The others only stared at me. They dispersed about the room, reminding me by the lightness and buoyancy of their movements of a flock of white plumey birds. I love that passage. And you talked earlier about Charlotte Bronti ripping up fence and garden of Jane Austen. Yes. And I filled in that passage. It's Jane is all observing a scene from Jane Austen, but she's the outsider looking in. Yes, that's great. She's switching the point of view from a Jane Austen story to the servant in the room watching. Yes, you're absolutely right, which you don't get in Austin, do you? You do get those conversation pieces. You do get those tabloes in which multiple women being in the same room are fine with one another or playing their position off each other to get power in a social world. But we don't see the servants point of view. It's very down to Nebby. Charlotte doesn't last long as a governess, either, having had a nervous breakdown in her teaching job. Yes. After a few months, she decides she can't bear being a governess. She can't bear being away from her sisters. Can't bear to be away from the personage. Emily and Anna are also struggling. They're likewise trying to do these jobs as governorses, as teachers, and finding they just can't do it. - Right. - Branwell, who was the great hope of the family, the only son. - The brother, yeah. - Is proving himself a complete darts. So he's decided to become a painter, which isn't helpful to anyone. - No, no, that's not a good idea. - And set himself up as a painter in Bradford, which fails. - Right, yes. - He becomes a tutor. He's sacked from his first job for some misdemeanor that nobody knows. And he finally finds work as a station clerk on the leads to Manchester railway line. He's already by this point in alcoholic and opium addict. So he's a drug addict as well. Charlotte is realizing what all the bronti children are realizing that once they're separated from one another, separated from the past and edge, they are incapable of thriving. They always come back. And Charlotte writes about this at one point. She talks in a letter about, "My home, the past and edge, is humbling unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world. The profound and intense affection, which brothers and sisters feel for each other, when their minds are cast in the same mold, their ideas drawn from the same source, when they have clung to each other from childhood, and when family disputes have never sprung up to divide them. How many siblings would really say that about one another?" - Very few. The siblings in Jane Eyre don't get along particularly well. The reads are at odds with one another. Adele's not only child, there's the boarding school, but we don't really have a sense of families of children. So it's obviously a very sacred space for the bronties. I suppose what it was like a kind of writer's workshop, that was where they were able to be creative, and they probably didn't get much feedback on their work elsewhere. - Yeah. And Charlotte realises that they need to do something because there's not enough income coming into the family, and her plan is that they will open a girl's school at the past and age. They will take in students, the bronties sisters will be the teachers. - Yes. - And to do that, they need to finish their own education and get teaching diplomas. So. - Oh, interesting. But they were quite well educated, weren't they? The bronties? - Well, yeah, a lot of it was home at education. They need their internet diploma. - Yeah. They're micro-credential. - They need their micro-credential to start the school. So she comes up with a plan that she and Emily should go to a finishing school in Brussels of all places and Patrick, their father agrees, it's investment. - Yeah, it would have been, he'll pay them money. That's what's going to enable them to start the school. And so Charlotte and Emily go to the continent. - Well, okay. - They go to Brussels. - So I didn't really realise that, although I should have because of reading Vallej. So, I mean, because we think of the bronties as the pin-up writers for the Yorkshire Moors, we think of those novels as really belonging to that landscape and very remote and isolated. And we forget that Charlotte and Emily had spent time on the continent and that Jane Eyre, itself, contains a very big world. Jane speaks what I think is really good French. Mr. Rochester has lived in France for a longer period of time. The rivers sisters at the end of the book, Syngen sisters speak really good German. Mr. Rochester has been all over the place. He's lived in the West Indies. What seems like a very local rural book actually contains within lots of evidence of travel and cultivation. It also contains within a lot of evidence of big patterns of migration and major world events, politically, that were happening offstage. - Yes. - It's quite a cosmopolitan book. - Yes, more cosmopolitan than people realise the bronties. - So how has Brussels, did they have a good time? - Well, we're going to need to wrap up this episode. I'm not going to try and claim Brussels in itself a cliffhanger. - Yeah, I was going to say, are you going to try and get a cliffhanger out Brussels? - It's not like, it's not like, come back for the next episode to hear about Brussels. But the cliffhanger is, is that while in Brussels something happened, which is Charlotte falls desperately in love with a man who is, in part, the model for the other character who sits at the heart of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester. And on that cliffhanger. - Oh, I can't wait. That's a cliffhanger. - We're going to be getting into the love story at the heart of Jane Eyre in the next episode and the unrequited version of that in Charlotte's own life. - You've been listening to the Secret Life of Box.