JANE AUSTEN AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË: TWO LADIES AT ODDS YET LOOKING FOR THE SAME ULTIMATE

 

JANE AUSTEN AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË: TWO LADIES AT ODDS YET LOOKING FOR THE SAME ULTIMATE

                       

Yes, the whole world is heading for the apotheosis on the 16^th of December 2025, the 250^th anniversary of Jane Austen (*1775-†1817), the English writer who is now revered as one of the grandes dames de la littérature européenne. And one of the most successful novelists – post mortem – in British history. Laura Hackett, at The Times, sums up the never-ending fascination, the ever-increasing infatuation with the authoress of Pride and Prejudice (1813) by qualifying her as:

“… the most beloved female writer in English literature – scrap that: most beloved writer...¹

A remarkable transformation for an early-19th century lady from the campagne, “provincial upper-middle-class life”, who never visited another country. A title of an essay, 2009, resumes the trajectory, all substance thereby revealing:

“Austen Goes Pop:The Evolution of Jane Austen from Rural Writer to Contemporary Icon “²

Yet the noisy foaming which began months ago (there are even talks of creating an Austenland), spreading like Tsunami-waves, is also bringing new and perhaps irreverent perspectives on that witty English lady. The new screen-versions of her novels, and also the ones centring on her sister, her family and contemporary re-transcriptions, add to the booming “Jane Austen-Industry”. Her contribution to the British economy, over the last two-hundred years, in terms of foreign earnings through royalties, films and television-serials rights, tourism and related paraphernalia, can only be surpassed, perhaps, by another lady: Agatha Christie (*1890-†1976).

But other countries are also trying to capitalise on the world-wide demand. A French film released in 2024, Jane Austen a gaché ma vie (Jane Austen has spoiled my life), portrays a young woman working in the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, a fan of Austen and a potential would-be writer. Some time ago, a manifesto was published by known French authors, entitled Austen Power, aimed at stimulating the reading of Jane Austen, aureoled with a “Feminist Avant-garde” crown.

Hence, the “quasi-monopoly” which had been enjoyed by England, and which had already been dented by the USA, now suffers threats from other corners of the world

                               

Looking for the “Dark Side” of Jane Austen, not forgetting the other

The “Dark Side” of Austen is one of those themes, becoming more and more recurrent.

Many point out, above all, at the novel Mansfield Park (1814), the last-but-one published during her lifetime. A denser, multilevel and complex text, where one has to struggle, in particular during the first twenty-thirty pages, in order to be accepted and become an intelligible witness of the parcours and the entanglements and dis-entanglements of so many figures, compared, for example, with the straighter main narrative thread of Emma (1815) or even Pride and Prejudice. The novel also contains the only explicit reference to “slaves” and “slavery” to be encountered in her whole narrative, as the family the protagonist Fanny Price has been “integrated” to, derives its wealth from estates in Antigua (Caribbean).

                                    

                                                    

Such a “darkness”, if it were to be the right conceptualisation, is also linked to a disputation about her letters, and the role played by her sister Cassandra in, so it is argued, destroying most of them (presumably 3,000), and of editing - no scruples at all – those which survived (about 160). Opinions divert, ranging from those who defend Cassandra, as in the case of Miss Austen, a four-part television-serial by the BBC, shown for the first time in 2025. This screen-recreation navigates through the new sea of “political correctness” and “debunking” of “epoch-biases”, by, among others, letting one key male figure, a surgeon, be portrayed by a colour-man. An event not impossible, then, yet very much unlikely. 

                                     

Gill Hornby, on the other hand, stated at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, that we ought to be grateful to Cassandra, Jane’s Sister, for destroying all those letters, as the author was “bitchy”. We may never know. Was that “bitchiness” a result of personal frustrations, or perhaps just Jane Austen’s irony and wittiness being raised to the power of 10?

                            

                                                   The Daily Telegraph, 27.05.2025.

De-historising Jane Austen

Great expectation exists also regarding a new television production, likely to appear on the screens early 2026, The Other Bennet Sister, which will also attempt to down-earth Austen into the trivialities of “our epoch” (if such a name is to be deserved…), no more “posh-accents”, getting away from the “fetishisation of a period”.

This “debunking” of the previous “period-dramas” will include clothing (much more modest bonnets, we presume...), hair-dressing (perhaps a “punkish” approach…), no more “sedated ballrooms scenes” (a little bit of “rock-and-roll”, no doubt…), and even the way people move:

“We will have a movement coach in to get the Bennet family to move more like a family…”, said producer Jane Tranter, apparently because everyone, above all extras, move “too slow” in the previous screen-versions, due to “excessive clothing”.

But did not everything at that time move much, much slower? The first steam-locomotive was built in 1804, the first successful commercial steam-boat was operated in 1807, and the first passenger steam train in 1825 … Jane Austen died in 1817.

Whether this, and the upcoming ones, re-working and re-translation of Austen’s novel onto the screen will ever be able to surpass the quality, and the depth, of the BBC 1995 crown-jewel, in particular because of the spoken English, remains a huge question mark. It is precisely that “classical, crystal-clear, elegant, humour-refined” language which has made Jane Austen one of the immortals in European literature.

Yet there is more to come. Andrew Davies, the known screen-writer, promises “slavery, psychopaths and early death” for the coming adaptations. 

 

                                                  

                                                          The Times, 13.10.2025

Attempts to “de-epoch” Jane Austen, to “de-contextualise”, to “modernise” the novels through films made with 21^st century lenses, by uprooting her from her epoch and her social class, to “de-historise” her, as if it were a puppet one could take anywhere, may obey to some unmentionable commercial ambitions. They risk, however, re-translating the author into the whimsical fashions of our time, which, in any case, have a clear “date of expiration”.

If it continues like this, we should not be surprised to be confronted soon with a “most original” screen-version of Pride and Prejudice, wherein Miss Elizabeth Bennet is refashioned into an early 19^th century version of Mrs. Marple, idem Mr. Darcy, who will appear as an ancestor of Hercule Poirot. Both working on a murder-mystery: Who killed Mr. Collins, the preposterous clergyman? Was it perhaps the father of Elizabeth, terrified at the prospect of Mr. Collins marrying his preferred daughter?

Yet that on-going debate on whether to “proletarise” Jane Austen (or at least lower her down from the upper-middle-class-rural society to a sort of lower-middle-class suburban society, speaking rural cockney) allows us to enter into the core of this contribution, the relegation of Austen’s narrative by Charlotte Brontë(*1816-†1855) to an almost “claustrophobic delineation of closed gardens, tranquil villages and superficial social interactions, lacking emotions, passion and … poetry”. Even accepting that Jane Austen did know how to write.

Comfort, escapism ...

A pertinent article The Guardian related to the “best literary comfort reads”, mentions the author Francesca Segal, who turns to Austen when she needs a “restorative read”. A reader would go farther, by stating:

                                                           

“Any novel by Jane Austen offers ultimate comfort and escapism, even in the trickiest of times…” The Guardian, 15.11.2024.

Comfort, escapism, refuge, soothing of the soul …

Was that very sensation which prompted Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), to “devalue” the novels of Jane Austen? Or at least those she had read.

Charlotte considers herself at “a distance” from, and not quite in the same wavelength as that of Jane.

Jane Austen’s limitations, according to Charlotte Brontë

Let us consider first the letters to G.H. Lewes (*1817-†1878), the author and philosopher who would become the lover and partner of Lady Evans (George Eliot) (*1819-†1880).

First letter to G.H. Lewes, January 12, 1848

‘Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride & Prejudice’ or ‘Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverley novels. I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; 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 bonny beck.

 I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.’

Second letter to G.H. Lewes, 1848

*G H Lewes’ letters to Jane Austen were not saved ...

‘You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that “Jane Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas) no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasms of poetry” – and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character , and one of the writers with the nicest sense of a means to an end that ever lived.” The last point only will I acknowledge. Can there be a great artist without poetry?’

Two years later, however, in a letter of the 12^th of April 1850 to William S. Williams, the 19^th century publisher and mentor of the authoress of Jane Eyre, Charlotte reveals that she has now read more of Austen, and has found some good (valuable) points:

“I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s work’s ‘Emma’ – read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable – anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her ready by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death – this Miss Austen ignores.”

Charlotte was reading Jane through the eyes of her epoch, and of her own view-of-the-world (Weltanschauung). That was a “romantic” view, in the sense of the Anglo-German romanticism which germinated first in Germany with the Sturm und Drang movement in the 1760s and early 1780s (to be translated as “Storm and Impetus” and not as “Storm and Stress”, as mentioned often in the virtual world).

It reached a first peak in 1774 with the publication of The Sorrows of the Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), the epistolary novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which became the first true European “best-seller”, apart from sending to premature death dozens and dozens of young readers who imitated the tragic destiny of the main male character outlined in the book. By the early 19^th century “Romanticism” was spreading like wildfire throughout England and France, and the rest of the world.

The strip-teasing of soul and mind to their recondite layers, the admission of darkness and mystery as valid companions, the wandering through obscure woods and mighty mountains, the search for farther, exotic lands, the submersion into nature, indeed, the glorification of nature, the deification of music (that most abstract of arts) as a firework of emotion and passion, tutti quanti, tutti quanti …, that was not the world of Jane Austen.

As stated by Tony Tanner in the Original Penguin Classics Introduction to

“This is not the place to embark on a summary of the Romantic movement. The point is that Jane Austen was brought up in eighteen-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definitions, and clear ideas which it inculcated. “³

Passion was considered, then, in the Anglo-Protestant culture as a “derailment of the mind, no matter how poetical that accident may appear to some, At that time, emotions and above all passions, if one happened to have been invaded by such an “illness”, were supposed to be kept under the surface. Passion is a dangerous word (a misleading one, too...), and in the sense of describing feelings and emotions being set on fire by the ego in relation to persons, ideals, objects and also nature, as such considered almost indecent in the English culture, at least up to the middle of the 19^th century.. Or to be kept well-hidden.

It comes from Greek through the Latin passio, the verb πάσχο, “to suffer” whereby the noun pathos, παθος, means “suffering”. Hence the current meaning of pathology, “the study of disease”.

Hence Charlotte’s comment, “anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant”.

Charlotte writes in English, but she thinks and speaks Romantisch or perhaps Romantischki⁴

No doubt, “nature” is not altogether ignored by James Austen, but it is mostly mentioned en passant, as a static décor, which just happens to be there. In “Romanticism” nature is a key character, not merely an extra.

It would however be absurd to state that, while “enlightened reasoning” happens to be absent in the novels of Charlotte, “emotions and feelings” resound through their non-existence in the novels of Jane.

Perhaps it has more to do with the ways passion, ardent feelings, could be expressed, could be redirected, above all, could be camouflaged. Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal to Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, apart from being one of the clumsiest ever registered in the history of world literature, is a passionate outburst of uncontrolled emotions, an irrational one, as the woman he choose is just, in the context of the asymmetry of “consequences” of both persons, “well below par”. Likewise, Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Darcy’s proposal is a romantic, emotional decision, a very irrational one, as she is rejecting one of the handsomest and richest bachelors in the whole country. As her father would say to Elizabeth, when she tells him that she has accepted Mr. Darcy’s second marriage proposal:

“Are you out of your senses to be accepting this man?”⁵

But all that “transaction” takes place in a civilised manner, with wishes of well-being and the usual courtesy of entering and leaving a room.

“… emotion over reason, or vice-versa …” But is it really such a dichotomy, that of “reason versus emotion”, to be considered as “binding” in comparing Jane’s oeuvre with that of Charlotte?

Let us come back to that most slippery of words, “surface”, as indicated by Charlotte,

“She (Jane) does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting.“

Indeed, the “surface” is there, but we know that, underneath, there are “things”, “palpitations”, “fears”. Charlotte would prefer all that to be displayed in the open, unmasked, rotund, aching. Jane let the reader unveil what is bubbling underneath the surface. They are different styles, not necessarily different understandings of human nature.

Hence the “emotion-reason” dichotomy rather as a “framework”, as a tentative draft, in order to find those “grey regions” in the text of both writers, where “emotion” and “reason” happen to coexist amicably.

Could we summarise that shaky dichotomy through paintings of both epochs?

Perhaps Jane Austen’s idyllic vision of a landscape, as portrayed by Angelika Kaufmann (*1741- †1807), the Austrian-Swiss lady who is supposed to be one of the painters admired by Jane.

“Portrait of the family of Ferdinand the 4^th of Napoli”. 1783, Museo e Real Bosco di Capidomonte.

Perhaps Charlotte Brontë’s inner vision of nature, as interpreted by Joseph Mallord William Turner (*1775-†1851).

Fire at Sea, 1850.

Yet one painter, Caspar David Friedrich (*1774-†1840), would have summarised both through a single tableaux.

Frau am Fenster, Woman at the window, 1822,

The motive of “the woman at the window” is enacted many times in the 1995 film-version of Sense and Sensibility (1811).

“Two ladies at odds yet looking for the same ultima…” What ultimate?

“The ultimate is to prove that women can use the word to recreate the world through a novel, as skilful as men, and, at times, perhaps with a sharper insight.”

Perhaps the most sympathetic conclusion is that of the writer Monica Ali. “I can’t conceive life without Austen and Tolstoy”.

                                            

The author of this blog would like to re-arrange that comment, leaving Tolstoy aside, as he is someone without whom life cannot possibly be understood.

I happen to believe that both Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, are two of the best and most relevant novels of the first half of the 19^th century. The temptation to scrap “two of” remains very strong, but let us have it as such, for the moment…

“I cannot conceive life without Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë."

Herewith then a continuous invitation to re-visit Jane and Charlotte, if possible, please far away from the whimsical and noisy re-writings of the modern media, just concentrate on the language.

1Laura Hackett, Deputy Literary Editor, The Times, January 25, 2025.

2Scholer, Christian, Rollins Scholarship Online, 2009.

3“Original Penguin Classics Introduction” (1974) by Tony Tanner, in Austen, Jean, Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics, 2003, p. 405.

4Both neologisms are the invention of the writer of this blog, the second-one having a sort of a “Slavic” resonance.

5Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics, p. 355. The underlying is ours.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: JANE EYRE, A WOMAN OF WILL AND RESILIENCE

 

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: JANE EYRE, A WOMAN OF WILL AND RESILIENCE.

 

 

„A chance encounter“ had to be – and indeed it was. Spain, 2010. Akin to those meetings in a railway station, when eyes connect for a few seconds, both man and woman considering the possibility of eternity, a day-dream destined to vanish after a few minutes. I had to spend some days in a flat in an almost deserted urbanization, not far away from the Mediterranean coast. I could even glimpse at the peaks of the mountains of Morocco. Abandoned in a shelf, and suffocated by dust, a few books were thirsting for a reader. One of them was Jane Eyre (1847), of Charlotte Brontë (*1816-  †1855), a paperback edition.

 

“It was about time”, I said to myself, who had been procrastinating for years in his resolution to get a “better understanding” of the British femmes de lettres of the 19^th century.  I submerged myself into the opening, just to find, to my utter amazement, that I could not abandon the novel until I had arrived at the last page.

 

 (Cover of the Penguin Popular Classics, left by an angel at the Church of St. John, in Berlin, Germany, on the 30^th of April 2021. The cover shows a detail from Mending the Tapestry (1835) by Daniel Pasmore (the elder), in the Library at Springhill, County Londonderry.)

 

And a second “chance-encounter” had to be, as can only be expected from someone who since 2010 had been impregnated by the magic of that novel. Indeed it was. A few weeks ago, as I started thinking about a contribution on Charlotte Brontë to the blog, I wondered whether on earth did I lie that copy – or was it just left behind in Spain? An hour afterwards I went out to do some shopping and visited, as usual, the Church of St. John near dem kleinen Tiergarten. And there it was, like the transformation of water into  wine at the Wedding of Cana, according to the Gospel of John (2.3.-5.), on the very top of a pile of books deposited upon a pew outside the church: A Penguin Popular Classics[1] edition of Jane Eyre, no doubt second-hand, yet very much presentable. The miracle continued, as I noticed, once back at my flat, that the copy had been read meticulously by a German woman (no doubt, whatsoever…), with a very good level of English, as evidenced in the ample number of commentaries and summaries of the handling, mostly in English, some in German.

 

To that angel (one of many…)  sent by St. John herewith my warmest thanks.

 

Published originally in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, under the pen-name “Currer Bell”, the opus appeared in three volumes, which roughly separate the three “blocks” (chapters 1-15, 16-27, 28-38) of the novel.  The second edition (1848) was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray (*1811-†1863), who replied “this is the greatest compliment I have ever received in my life”. It soon became a success, albeit some critical voices were raised, pointing at some “unchristian” deviances in the portrayal of intimate relations and of a young woman who was not afraid to defy conventions, at all levels. Charlotte refuted wholeheartedly those accusations in the prologue to the 1848 edition. Yet it needs only attentive reading to understand that those “defiances” are not “deviances”, rather the expression of a will to survive, which the young lady ranks as paramount within the Christian view-of-the world.

 

We do not know whether the dedication to Thackeray took place before or after he issued his dictum, Jane Eyre ought to be regarded as “the masterwork of a great genius”[2].

 

Let us use a ready-available ranking of the novel, to set up the framework for discussion, summa summarum:

 

“The novel revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate first person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the “first historian of the private consciousness”, and the literary ancestors of writers like Proust and Joyce.

 

The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, and it is considered by many to be ahead of the time because of Jane’s individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion and feminism. It, along with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous romance novels of all time.”[3]

 

Let it all stand, and sound, as written, albeit to categorize anyone as being the “first historian” of “anything” remains a risky, fragile, tentative statement. Yet we need more, in particular the details about the crafty techniques implemented by the authoress in constructing such an achievement, to verify whether those accolades do hold. And whether the films version – nowadays –  do help us to better appreciate the precious raw materials which had been processed into fine art.

 

The plot.

 

Somewhere in Northern England, 1830s or 1840s…

 

Jane Eyre becomes an orphan after the death – typhus– of her parents, thus living in Gateshead Hall with the family of her maternal uncle, Mr. Reed. She is disliked, bullied and epitomised as a burden. To get rid of her, she is then sent to Lowood Institution, a school for poor and orphaned girls, where hardship would seem to be the only way of life:

“During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented out stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church, but within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from severe cold; we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes, and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet.”[4]

 

 

The girls at Lowood Institution, about to break with their mugs the frozen water in their small basins, so that they could wash themselves. [5]

 

There lurks Mr. Brocklehurst, who has concocted his own handy-to-use, abridged and rustic theology, whose essence was “...the more your body suffers, the more your soul shall rejoice...” Responding to Mrs. Temple, who insisted the children could not just eat burnt-porridge and remain fasting until dinner-time, he states:

“Madame, allow me an instant. You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying (…) … to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine consolation, “If ye suffer hunger, or thirst for my Sake, happy are ye”. Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt-porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!”[6]

The dreaded Mr. Brocklehurst would be restrained after typhus swamped the hospice, killing dozens of girls, including Helen, Jane’s dearest companion, who died in her arms. To be read: the dialogue between the two, as Helen senses that she is to leave this world, a moving poetic monument which only a great artist could avoid making it sound too lacrimosus.[7]

Jane Eyre becomes then a teacher at Lowood Institution, and having advertised for a position as “governess”, she is invited to come to Thornfield Hall (not just a simple name...), property of Mr. Edward Rochester. She is to educate Mademoiselle Adéle Varens, ward of Mr. Rochester, de facto an unexpected “by-product” of one of his Parisian amusements.

 

It does not take long to Jane Eyre to realise that “something is aloof” in the manor-house, awkward signs during the day, strange voices and bizarre noises at night, Mr. Rochester’s bed being set on fire, not plausible as a mere accident.

Mr. Rochester exhales the allure of a Byronic landlord and world-traveller, yet it does no take long to Jane Eyre to realise that he is, in his innermost, an injured man, still bleeding scars of more than one faux pas in his life:

 

“I have travelled all over the world, Miss Eye, and it is very overrated”[8].

 

The dexterity of the authoress as a Flemish grand-master of portraying is very much recurrent, as in the case of the “Dowager Lady Ingram”, whose daughter is rumoured to be on her way to become Mr. Rochester’s wife, adding a fine touch of irony:

 

“They were all three of the loftiest stature of woman. The dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine; her hair (by candlelight at least); her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect. Most people would have termed her a splendid woman of her age: and so she was, no doubt, physically speaking; but then there was an expression of almost insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and countenance. She had Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these features appeared to me not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with pride; and the chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of almost preternatural erectness. She had, likewise, a fierce and hard eye: it reminded me of Mrs Reed’s; she mouthed her words in speaking; her voice was deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical – very intolerable, in short. A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity.”[9]

 

„...when eyes happen to be more explicit than words... “

 

Mr. Rochester (Toby Stephens) looking at Jane Eyre (Ruth Wilson), 2006, BBC.

 

 ...and vice-versa., shortly after she refused to accept a 50£ note, demanding only 15£ corresponding to her salary. “I read as much in your eye (beware, by the by, what you express with that organ, I am quick at interpreting its language). “[10]

 

Mr. Rochester will make a marriage proposal to Jane, unexpected by most, though anticipated by the beginning of Chapter 23:

“A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour, even singly, our-wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion.”[11]

 

          „...no better landscape in this world than the face of a woman in love...”

 Ruth Wilson enacting a superb, enchanting performance of Jane Eyre, in the BBC 2006 series, the morning following the marriage proposal of Mr. Rochester. 

 

“As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered if it were a dream (….) While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as they had beheld the found of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.”[12]

 

Yet even the tiniest and the apparently just ornamental elements in this novel do have a message, for now or later:

 “Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adéle came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.[13]”

 The marriage ceremony is organised in haste, perhaps even too precipitously, with almost no invited guests.

 There was a reason:

 “Mr. Rochester cannot marry! He already has a wife...”, irrupts Mr. Briggs, “a solicitor of_____ Street, London“.

 

            (2006) BBC, Mr. Rochester and Jane Eye, frozen by the fulminant irruption.

 

 

2011 [14], BBC, Jane Eye (Mia Wasikowska) and Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) under a state of shock. The priest, Mr. Wood, even more.

 

The “phantom” in the manor-house has now become a fully fleshy, bony figure, hidden in the attic, the lunatic woman whom Mr. Rochester married in the West Indies.

 There is no other option for Jane Eyre but to leave Thornfield Hall, rejecting all the alternative proposals advanced by Mr. Rochester, as they do not comply with her Christian vision of the world.

 

 Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska, BBC 2011) alone at a cross-road, which promises four roads to nowhere.

 

“Whitcross is no town, not even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet, whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness.”[15]

 

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), in the 2011 BBB film version, wandering across nature, not knowing whether any future may still be possible.

 

“A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often noticed, and wondered whether it led: thither I bent my steps. No reflection was allowed: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet ‒ so deadly sad – that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.”[16]

 

The last refuge, perhaps the only possibility of some answer:

 

“Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment – not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow creatures are – none that saw me would have a kind thought or a god wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.”[17]

 

And that is the statement that confirms that we have in our hands a product of the true Romantik.

 

Unable to find any job in a hamlet, and unsuccessful at trading her handkerchief and gloves for food, she will sleep on the moor, to later arrive at the home of the clergyman St. John (what a coincidence…) Rivers and her two sisters, where she is first refused help, taken as a mad vagrant woman. St. John Rivers will intervene, giving her food and lodging. Her new life will thus begin, under still austere yet more tranquil auspices.

 

 

The Bildungsroman

 

 

A “romance novel” no doubt, as defined within the Anglo-Saxon world, depicting the relationship between a man and a woman, from which one has the right to expect an “optimistic ending”. In German and Spanish, and possibly many other languages, such a genre would be translated as a “Liebesroman” or “novela de amor”. Many would tend to equate such a definition with a “romantic novel”, but we shall reject the latter as a synonym of the former, and we will come later to the consequent discussion.

 

Jane Eyre is, above all, as has been duly noted by many, a Bildungsroman – but not only. Usually translated into English as a “coming-of-age” novel (and film), that definition does touch on some facets of the “Sich-Bilden” (the construction of “oneself”), but it does not convey the fullest meaning therewith contained. It is not only an Entwicklungsroman, which would be the equivalent of the “coming-of-age”. The world Bild emphasizes the construction of a relevant “picture” of the world—and of the individual role in it. It is a “coming-to-terms” with the world, but emphasizing the subjective will, the possibility of constructing your-own-world, yet within a religious, in this case a Christian ethical framework.

 

Jane Eyre is also a carefully conceived and craft-fully implemented thriller – perhaps one of the best in 19^th century English narrative, at least from a female perspective, containing some features proper to a Gothic novel. Not a few people argued that the plot concerning the “phantom” in the castle may be considered at least a little bit too “far-fetched”. Granted, but it is not implausible, in particular for 19^th century social and family structures, to have someone who had been “deprived of its senses” quasi-arrested, or at least isolated, in an attic. It starts as a thriller in the “first block” of the novel, as we do not know whether the orphan girl would survive the hardship and the bullying in her “substitute-family”, even more so in the inhumane hospice.

 

 

 

Much more: A multi-layered novel, woven with quotes and references of dozens of writers, sacred texts and artists, from the Bible to Shakespeare, from Samuel Richardson to Friedrich Schiller, et al. It is also a “romantic” novel, yet in the truest sense of Anglo-German romanticism, die Romantik, which goes beyond the intimate connaissance between a man and a woman. It implies the upgrading of the individual, of the sole soul, who can find soothing solace, and perhaps even answers, in nature. Nature to be understood herewith as the repository of God, “thither ye go”, to get balsam from the Waldeinsamkeit,  a world which will unleash – much later ‒ the indestructible passion between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at least as cinematographically portrayed[18]. Translatable as “solitude in the woods (forest)”, the term captures the possibility of both “being alone” and “accompanied” by the trees and all the “spirits” kicking around, the latter neither elves or goblins, simply metaphors for the souls of the cherished ones, on both sides of the time-barrier.

 

It is not aleatory that Mr. Rochester categorises Jane Eyre since their first, accident-prone encounter[19], as an “elf”,  someone out of a “fairy tale, who had bewitched my horse”:[20]

 

 

“A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard. She comes from the other world – from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf! But I’d as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis fatuus light in a marsh. Truant! Truant![21]”.

 

 Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), BBC 2011, walking through Hay Lane, just before Mr. Rochester’s horse were “to slip on the sheet of ice which glazed the causeway...”[22], and fall.

 

That is why Jane Eyre makes of a walk through the woods, or through the moorland, or in the mountains, the most reliable therapy for any turbulence of the soul, preferring, in many instances in the novel, to alight from the carriage, two or three miles before destination, in order to feel the earth underneath her shoes.  She becomes a “Waldgängerin”, a “forest-walker”, backdating a concept which a German writer in the 20th century was to engrave as the title of one of his most emblematic books[23]

 

She might be alone, but not inevitably lonely – on the contrary.

 

Jane Eyre, die Waldgängerin, the “forest-walker”, the “bonny wanderer”[24] striding from Thornfield Hall to the manor-house of Ferndean, at the end of the novel, to re-encounter Mr. Rochester. 

 

                                  (Ruth Wilson, 2006 BBC series version)

 

The films.

 

The richness of the text is such that it constituted an inexhaustible diamond-mine for movie-makers. There are least 24 film- and television-versions, since 1910, including three muted English films (1910, 1914 and 1921), and one German (1926).  Plus, a Dutch one (1958) and a Greek one (1968). Not to be forgotten, a Czech mini-series in 1972. To be noticed, a 1943 production with Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester and Jean Fontaine as Jane Eyre.

 

It is not altogether impossible that the novel of Charlotte Brontë may well the most filmed in the history of world literature. The screen cannot possible aspire to reproduce the whole constellation of quoted authors and artists, nor all the scenes and unexpected twists, but it can enhance the portrayal of nature, which is the constant “personage” of the novel in the background – and not only there. We refer in particular to the remarkable screen-recreations of 2006 and 2011.

 

Yet the films can also give a more resounding version of the dialogues.

 

The screenwriter of the 2006 film-version did a remarkable job in summarising and rewriting the first stern conversation between Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, respecting the substance of the original text (Pgs. 123-24), but adding the necessary tightness and poignancy required by the dialogues in the screen-version:

-          Where are you from?

-          Lowood Institution, Sir.

-          How long were you there?

-          Eight years, Sir.

-          I am amazed you survived. You are so small. Did they not feed you?

-          No, Sir.

-          And how do you find yourself here and not sill there?

-          I advertised, Sir.

-          Of course you did. What about your family?

-          I have none, Sir.

-          None whatsoever? Friends?

-          None, Sir.

-          None at all?

-          I had a friend once but she died a long time ago, Sir.

-          You are lucky, Miss Eyre. If you do not love another living soul, then you are never going to be disappointed.

-          Yes, Sir.

 

The legacy

 

 

There is an echoing, yet also contradictory and perhaps even ironic, message permeating the whole substratum of the novel, which becomes only explicit after coming to the end ‒and after having taken distance from the text. Had her body and soul not been tested to the utmost during her years at the residence of her aunt, and during her first years at Lowood Institution, Jane Eyre would not have been able to survive the devastating shock of seeing the very ceremony of her marriage being torn to pieces –leading, on top, to gruesome, almost nauseating revelations.  That is a stroke of destiny that few human beings would be able to cope with.

 

The young lady who found refuge and solace on books about exotic fauna and flora, and far-away countries, who used painting as her way of reconstructing imaginary and real landscapes, and subtly positioning herself in those sceneries, and who understood that her “only true home” was nature, above all the forest, had – perhaps unconsciously – erected inside herself a thick granite wall, to protect the feeble flame of her soul, to repel the most ferocious onslaughts of the devil himself.

 

This Innerlichkeit is already striking, and augurs well, when Mr. Rochester expressed his bewildered admiration for the water-colours (“yet the drawings are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish.[25]”), in their first meeting at Thornfield Hall. They are indeed highly symbolic:

 

“The first represented clouds, low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea, all the distance was in eclipse (…) the second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill (...)the third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky...”[26]

 

“-Where you happy when you painted these pictures? asked Mr. Rochester presently. - I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.[27]”

 

The young lady had already constructed her own “worlds”, both inside and outside.

 

Jane Eyre survived, “built-herself” thanks to a bullet-proof innermost, and achieved happiness. The tragedy is that such a parcour was not to be bestowed upon the authoress of this magnificent and moving novel. Charlotte Brontë died three weeks before achieving the age of 39, with her unborn child, her health having been permanently deteriorated by the poor environment of the school she went to between 1824-25, where two of her sisters died. Thus depriving us, too early, of one of the most gifted novelists of the English language in the 19^th century. But she shall not be forgotten.

 

For fifteen years after the death of Helen, Jane Eyre’s beloved friend, “her grave in Brocklebridge Churchyard was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a gray marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word: Resurgam.[28]”

 

Jane Eyre was re-born and did not forget.

---

[1]Penguin Books, 1994.

[2]As stated in the back cover of the Penguin Popular Classics edition.

[3]Wikipedia,

[4]Pg. 62.

[5]BBC television drama serial, co-production with WGBH Boston, 2006. Screenplay by Sandy Welch, Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre), Toby Stephens (Mr. Rochester), Lorraine Ashbourne (Mrs. Fairfax), directed by Susanna White.

[6]Pg. 65.

[7]Pgs. 82-84.

[8]Film (2006), 37:56.

[9]Pg. 191.

[10]Mr. Rochester to Miss Jane Eyre. Pg. 136-37.

[11]Pg. 246.

[12]Pg. 256.

[13]Pg. 254.

[14]BBC film,2011, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, screenplay by Moira Buffini, Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre), Michael Fassbender (Mr. Rochester), Judy Dench (Mrs. Fairfax).

[15]Pg. 319.

[16]Pg. 317.

[17]Pg. 319. Our underlying.

[18]ITV Film, 3:12:55, Victoria, 2016. Directed by Sandra Goldbacher.

[19]Pg. 112-117.

[20]Pg. 123.

[21]Pgs. 242-243.

[22]Pg. 114.

[23]Jünger, Ernst. Der Waldgang, first edition 1951.

[24]Pg. 138.

[25]Pg. 128.

[26]Pg. 127.

[27]Pg. 127.

[28]Pg. 84.