That Jane Eyre is a novel based on its author’s experience, emotional and sometimes literal, is hardly a “secret”, as the title of this book suggests. The idea that Jane is Charlotte Brontë has a long heritage, and has been explored by biographers ranging from Elizabeth Gaskell in 1857 to modern exponents such as Winifred Gérin, Lyndall Gordon, Juliet Barker and Claire Harman, among others.
Even when the manuscript first landed on the desk of the London publishing firm of Smith, Elder in 1847, the executives there probably suspected that its first-person narrative contained a woman’s intimate revelations, despite the fact that it was sent to them under a male pseudonym from far-off Yorkshire. It was they, and not Charlotte herself, as John Pfordresher implies, who decided to bring it out under the title “Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell”, whereupon it became an instant sensation.
“Charlotte consistently denied she had written the novel
Charlotte’s ideal in art was “truth”, but her Romantic notion of that truth took in the subjective as well as the factual. She was not, like Jane, an orphan; she did not grow up to marry a Rochester. But she could not have created her most famous character if she hadn’t dug deep into herself and her past.
Despite her artistic faith in truth, Charlotte consistently denied to her local Yorkshire acquaintances that she had written Jane Eyre (until she was definitively outed). That was in large part becauseshe had used some real-life models. Lowood, for instance, the grim boarding-school where the child Jane experiences hunger and abuse, was firmly based on Cowan Bridge, the establishment to which Charlotte and her sisters were sent by their cash-strapped father in 1824, when Charlotte was just eight, after their mother’s death three years earlier. The two elder girls, Maria and Elizabeth, died of disease contracted there, weakened by the institution’s poor diet and inhuman regime. Had it not been for Cowan Bridge, there might have been five, not three, Brontë sisters for posterity to remember.
Charlotte was wise to worry that her portrayal of the school would prove controversial if recognised. When in 1857, two years after Charlotte’s death, Gaskell revealed the true-life origins of Lowood, she was forced to retract her account by supporters of the Rev Carus Wilson, the school’s proprietor, whom Charlotte had transformed into the sadistic hypocrite Mr Brocklehurst.
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Much of the embattled sense of self that fed into the subjective intensity of Jane Eyre might have been rooted in this early trauma, but it was also informed by later experiences. The humiliating social invisibility that Charlotte experienced as a governess between 1839 and 1841, for instance, is replayed in the novel in the party scene, where Rochester’s grand friends ignore her (although Rochester’s ward Adele is a model of compliance compared with the real children that Charlotte taught).
As many have before him, Pfordresher finds the origins of the love affair between Jane and her employer Rochester in Charlotte’s unrequited real-life infatuation with Constantin Heger, the literature professor who taught her in Brussels, where she went in her early twenties to perfect her French. He makes no bones about the discomfiting sadomasochism that permeates the novel’s portrayal of romantic love, but is on shakier ground when he claims that Rochester was partly based on the Brontës’ father, Patrick.
Where Pfordresher is at his best is in tracing the origins of Jane Eyre in the texts of Charlotte’s later juvenilia, examples of the “scribblemania” to which the Brontë siblings were all addicted from infancy right through to adulthood. What is missing from his account, however, is a sense of the wider literary and historical context within which Charlotte was writing, despite welcome mentions of Byron. Pfordresher also skims over the contributions of previous modern critics. That the first Mrs Rochester is Jane’s (and even Charlotte’s) doppelgänger is nothing new, and was, for example, explored by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic decades ago.
Since the late 19th century, commentators have been searching for the “originals” of the characters and places in the Brontë novels, but even when they are identified they rarely tell the whole story. What Charlotte read fed her mind just as much as what she experienced, including many books and periodicals that have now disappeared from the canon. She was not a naive writer, simply transcribing her experiences and wish-fulfilment fantasies, but a sophisticated literary alchemist who created a startlingly new voice by melding her inner life with wider culture.
There is little that is new in this “secret history”. Despite its limitations, though, and occasional minor errors, it is hard not to be won over by the readability of its modest, no-nonsense, unhurried prose. This is an engaging introduction to Charlotte and her famous novel, which will whet the appetite of anyone who is coming to either of them for the first time.
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Norton £20 pp256
Read an extract on The Sunday Times website
Lucasta Miller’s books include The Brontë Myth