tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/jane-eyre-26796/articlesJane Eyre – The Conversation2022-12-06T17:24:46Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1952382022-12-06T17:24:46Z2022-12-06T17:24:46ZHow the pandemic affected our approach to reading and interpretation of books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498226/original/file-20221130-18-6532fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=74%2C0%2C3393%2C1707&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/bookcrossing-concept-happy-people-exchanging-borrowing-2031737963">GoodStudio/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the pandemic, reading took on new meaning. People turned to books for comfort. Some read to confront difficult issues, especially following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Others used reading as a way to care for their children in locked-down houses. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/book-sales-surge-self-isolating-readers-bucket-list-novels">Sales figures and lending data</a> showed a huge spike in people buying and borrowing books. We wanted to follow the stories of real readers and <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reading-novels-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-9780192857682?q=reading%20novels%20during%20the%20pandemic&lang=en&cc=dk">our new book</a> uses a rare combination of literary analysis and qualitative interviewing to capture these dynamics of reception. </p>
<p>While many commentators at the beginning of the pandemic <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/03/9581961/long-books-to-read-in-quarantine">endorsed reading</a> as a straightforward way to relax, our readers showed that the practice morphed and took on new forms and meanings. </p>
<p>Based on hundreds of survey responses and hours of reader interviews from Denmark and the UK, the study makes the interpretation of literature something dynamic and ongoing. And it suggests that readers themselves are agents of meaning, even in the case of novels that seem the most stable in our culture.</p>
<p>Reading during the pandemic showed how books and their meanings change. Novels that we think of as settled in their significance acquire new meaning as they are read under unfolding conditions, exposed to the vagaries of history. </p>
<p>In our research we show how Albert Camus’s The Plague became an unlikely hit in 2020, how the affordances of Sally Rooney’s romantic fiction seemed suddenly to apply to the lovers unable to meet, and how long novels that had intimidated pre-pandemic readers became lifelines in their heft.</p>
<h2>Tricky reading</h2>
<p>For many people, reading became more difficult during this time.</p>
<p>Far from giving everyone uninterrupted time to attend to long novels by authors like Tolstoy, lockdown exacerbated the separations and challenges of everyday life. </p>
<p>Take Jane Eyre, a novel that many readers picked up during lockdown because it was on their shelves. Suddenly, this classic seemed to be a novel about a woman locked in small rooms and living through a cholera epidemic. Many also took it up under conditions that overlapped directly with the book’s scenes of homeschooling. </p>
<p>One respondent called Phoebe, for instance, deliberately avoided rereading Jane Eyre for these reasons. Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel of loneliness and love was, in 2020, “too creepy”. The story of Jane being locked up made her feel unsafe while she lived alone through lockdown in the confines of her own room. </p>
<p>Another interviewee, Alexandra, was troubled by the idea of reading Hilary Mantel’s bestseller The Mirror and the Light, explaining: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew that I would be saying goodbye to Sir Thomas Cromwell […] I looked at it and I thought, what if I die before I get to the end of this? It will be the most unsatisfactory experience. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rather than sizing up the third part of Mantel’s intimate portrayal of the life of Thomas Cromwell as offering the ideal opportunity for narrative immersion, Alexandra viewed the very thickness of the book as problematic. Her intense fear of death in the pandemic and expectation of Cromwell’s literary demise converge on the length of narrative, which stretches into a future that had become harder to face.</p>
<h2>Slipperiness of time</h2>
<p>For the reader caught up in a global pandemic, a novel like The Plague, Albert Camus’s famous story of a town suffering a deadly virus, reads differently than it usually would for, say, the school student of French literature. One interviewed reader, for instance, discussed the novel’s temporal slipperiness. </p>
<p>Normally, of course, the very lack of measurable time would suggest the novel as an allegory – untied to a particular time, a warning of dark political forces turning up and spreading at any moment. But in 2020, when time <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-philosophical-idea-that-can-help-us-understand-why-time-is-moving-slowly-during-the-pandemic-151250">felt like it was moving oddly</a> The Plague’s confused sense of time felt realistic, as if it were mimicking our lived experience of a pandemic. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A book in a tropical setting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498244/original/file-20221130-26-7rehn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Plague’s allegorical story felt mor real in 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/setif-algeria-august-24-2022-close-2194820509">Hamdi Bendali/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet, it would be a mistake to assume all readers suddenly ditched allegory for realism or real-life correspondence. As Kirsten, a Danish woman in her 30s, explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I ended up buying The Plague because I was more interested in the metaphorical portrait of the occupation (of France by the Nazis) than in what epidemics do to a society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By following real readers, our study provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history and shows the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. By exploring these varied experiences, we investigated the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people’s experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the experience of reading more generally. </p>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates the dynamic process of reading and the ways in which books change depending on where and when they are read and by whom.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195238/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:ben.davies@port.ac.uk">ben.davies@port.ac.uk</a> received funding for this project from The Carlsberg Foundation. In summer 2022, he received new funding from the Council for the Defence of British Universities. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:tinalup@hum.ku.dk">tinalup@hum.ku.dk</a> receives funding from the Carlsberg Foundation </span></em></p>Classic books like Jane Eyre took on new meanings while the lengths of others made us aware of our mortality.Ben Davies, Senior lecturer in Literature and Theory, University of PortsmouthChristina Lupton, Professor of English, Germanic, and Romance languages., University of CopenhagenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1840922022-06-14T14:14:58Z2022-06-14T14:14:58ZFive books to read while in the Derbyshire countryside<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468428/original/file-20220613-45684-djvs1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C9000%2C4001&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/panorama-view-hathersage-moor-peak-district-708073351">Lukasz Pajor/Shuttertsock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Derbyshire countryside, in England’s East Midlands, is a region that has inspired writers – both classic and contemporary. The juxtaposition of rolling hills, stark moorland and craggy summits play backdrop to numerous novels in a variety of genres. </p>
<p>The area is easily reached from a number of large cities – but parts are incredibly remote. The Peak District and Derbyshire Dales, in particular, are popular with hikers, artists and families alike. </p>
<p>Here are five novels to read if you are visiting that will really bring the beauty and complexity of the the Derbyshire countryside alive.</p>
<h2>Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A country estate." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468429/original/file-20220613-22566-aqdcet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pemberley is believed to have been based on Chatsworth House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/chatsworth-house-peak-district-england-image-1862684077">Mountaintreks/Shuttertsock</a></span>
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<blockquote>
<p>I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Elizabeth Bennett facetiously attributes the beginnings of her romance with the famously proud and reticent Mr Darcy in Austen’s classic tale of misunderstanding and redemption. Pemberley, Darcy’s ancestral home, is based on <a href="https://www.chatsworth.org/">Chatsworth House</a>, the stately home built and owned by Duke of Devonshire near the picturesque town of Bakewell. </p>
<p>Elizabeth’s tour of Pemberley with her aunt and uncle can easily be imagined on a trip to Chatsworth house. It is a grand old building with a storied history of its own. It is, however, very proud of its connections with Austen and a bust of Darcy from the 2005 adaptation of <a href="https://www.chatsworth.org/news-media/chatsworth-on-film/pride-and-prejudice/">Pride and Prejudice</a> can be seen on your visit. </p>
<p>The house’s extensive grounds are also exquisite, as it lies along a beautiful sweep of the River Derwent. Bakewell is also worth a visit as it is thought that Austen wrote part of Pride and Prejudice novel while staying in the town. A plaque at The Rutland Arms pub commemorates her stay. </p>
<h2>Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="View of countryside." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468430/original/file-20220613-51858-e37n9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Views from Mother Cap of the Dark Peak in the Peak District in Derbyshire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/views-mother-cap-dark-peak-district-2142051115">Alex Manders/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<blockquote>
<p>From the top of the moor when people turned they could see the village: the beech wood and the allotments, the church tower and the cricket ground, the river and the quarry…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Winner of the 2017 Costa Book Award, this tense and brooding novel is set in an unnamed Peak District village. The plot follows the inhabitants of the village in the years after a young girl on holiday with her family goes missing. The disappearance of the girl is a common event which ties together numerous characters whose stories reflect both the support and stifling atmosphere of small village life. </p>
<p>The reservoirs detailed in the book are reminiscent of areas of the Dark Peak, described as the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Peak">higher and wilder</a>” part of Derbyshire’s Peak District. Ladybower reservoir is particularly stunning, and near to both moorland and woodland in which it can be imagined that one could go missing. The scenes of farming on quadbikes in the moors, the descriptions of the village pub, and the boredom of teenagers misbehaving on the moors can be easily be envisaged.</p>
<h2>Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Old stately manor." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468431/original/file-20220613-8276-5q3y7n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">North Lees Hall in Peak District National Park, Derbyshire is believed to have inspired Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hathersage-derbyshire-uk-august-21-2020-1800512683">John B Hewitt/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<blockquote>
<p>Finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle, I saw down under it. High banks of moor were about me; the crag protected me: the sky was over that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this classic gothic tale, Bronte’s plain but spirited heroine becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall. Her burgeoning love for her employer, Edward Rochester, is marred by strange happenings in the night. Thornfield has a secret. </p>
<p>The hall itself is based on <a href="https://www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/visiting/places-to-visit/stanage-and-north-lees/north-lees-hall">North Lees Hall</a> near Hathersage in the Peak District. You can follow a Jane Eyre trail which includes nearby Stanage Edge, an awe-inspiring rock formation with incredible views across the moors. The moorland is recognisable in descriptions of Jane’s desperation and near-starvation after she discovers Rochester’s hidden past and flees Thornfield. </p>
<h2>Adam Bede – George Eliot</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Mill and canal." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468432/original/file-20220613-8276-slb204.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cromford’s mill are recognisable in Adam Bede.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/cromford-united-kingdom-september-7-2014-234418204">Caron Badkin/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<blockquote>
<p>Look at the canals, an’ th’ aqueduc’s, an’ th’ coal-pit engines, and Arkwright’s mills there at Cromford…"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Adam Bede follows the lives of characters in rural Derbyshire in 1799 and was written following a visit Eliot paid to her aunt and uncle in Wirksworth. Eliot’s aunt, Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, recounted a story of a visit she had made to comfort a woman convicted of infanticide. Although dismissive of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=erreAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=george+eliot+cousin+samuel+evans&source=bl&ots=_UVdGmFpeV&sig=ACfU3U3xysLipop0QzshzyLUU_J7TzpPWg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjt8a6M84HhAhUqShUIHe2SCVMQ6AEwDHoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=george%20eliot%20cousin%20samuel%20evans&f=false">claims</a> that her characters were solely based on her visit, Eliot acknowledged her aunt’s role in planting the “<a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/realism-and-research-in-adam-bede">germ</a>” of her novel. </p>
<p>This inspiration is seen in the book’s heroine Dinah Morris – also a methodist preacher – and the ill-fated Hetty Sorrel, who falls pregnant out of wedlock. The industrial landscape of Eliot’s setting Stoneyfield is clearly recognisable in Wirksworth’s surroundings, and both Cromford Canal and Arkwright’s Mill can be visited. </p>
<h2>The Wintry Peacock – D. H. Lawrence</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A wide angle view of England village." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468433/original/file-20220613-20-a8ozc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lawrence brings the isolated countryside of Middleton-by-Wirksworth alive in his book The Wintry Peacock.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Middleton-by-Wirksworth#/media/File:Middleton-by-Wirksworth_-_geograph.org.uk_-_453781.jpg">Stephen Henley/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<blockquote>
<p>I went outside, and saw the valley all white and ghastly below me, the trees black and thin looking like wire…" </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lawrence moved to Middleton-by-Wirksworth after leaving Zennor in Cornwall in 1918, where Lawrence and his wife Frieda had encountered unpleasantness due to Frieda’s German heritage under the shadow of the first world war. In letters written to <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Selected-Letters-D-Lawrence-Cambridge/dp/0521777992">friends</a>, Lawrence’s discontent is clear. He feels he has been forced into exile, made worse by the bitter winter and barren landscape. </p>
<p>Feelings of isolation are reflected in his descriptions of the countryside in The Wintry Peacock. Set in the valley Lawrence’s cottage overlooked, his protagonist encounters a lonely and unhappy wife whose absent military husband has received a love-letter from a woman abroad.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184092/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heather Green works for Wirksworth Heritage Centre in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. </span></em></p>Books that will bring the beauty of Derbyshire’s rolling hills alive.Heather Green, PhD Candidate, Literary Heritage, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1755682022-01-25T14:24:34Z2022-01-25T14:24:34ZJane Eyre – content warnings are as old as the novel itself<p>“<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10382323/Read-Jane-Eyre-dare-University-students-given-trigger-warnings-classic-literature.html">Read Jane Eyre if you dare</a>” warned papers recently. The Daily Mail had sent a request for information to Salford University and subsequently claimed that the institution had issued “trigger warnings” on a literature module that included Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. </p>
<p>The Daily Mail article quoted Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen who noted that “generations of children have been able to cope” with reading these novels “without being damaged”. The argument appears to be based partly on the fact that many of these books have been the subject of [film and TV adaptations] “aimed at family audiences”. </p>
<p>In The Telegraph, journalist <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/01/10/does-jane-eyre-really-need-trigger-warning/%20noting%20that">Celia Walden also criticised the “trigger warning”</a> saying: “just last week, I started reading Jane Eyre to my 10-year old daughter”. </p>
<p>But labelling Jane Eyre as a dangerous text is nothing new - and it certainly wasn’t recommended for children when it first appeared. </p>
<h2>A dangerously addictive text</h2>
<p>When Jane Eyre was first published in 1847, it was generally agreed to be unputdownable. <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/charlotte-bronte/claire-harman/9780241963661">Brontë biographer Claire Harman</a> describes how the publisher WS Williams missed meals and appointments to read the book in a single day. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray recalled that he had “lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it” and even Queen Victoria found it “intensely interesting”. </p>
<p>Another novelist and reviewer, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/yearenglstud.49.2019.0029">Margaret Oliphant</a> later noted that in reading Jane Eyre, “we are swept on the current and never draw breath till the tale is ended.” For Oliphant, though, this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “This impetuous little spirit,” she wrote, has “dashed into our well-ordered world, broke its boundaries, and defied its principles — and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8IFsdfk3mlk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Oliphant’s concern was partly over the influence the book might have on other writers, leading them to come up with similarly sensational plots and characters. But there was also a sense among some parents that Jane Eyre was not a book to give to your daughters. </p>
<p>Thackeray loved the book, but his daughter <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/charlotte-bronte/claire-harman/9780241963661">Anny recalled</a> that his children were not “given Jane Eyre to read”. Instead, they had “taken it away without leave” and read it in secret. </p>
<p>The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell – Charlotte’s friend and later biographer – banned her eldest daughter from reading the book until she was 20, <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-bronte-myth/lucasta-miller/9780099287148">Lucasta Miller suggests in The Bronte Myth</a>.</p>
<h2>The appeal of the disreputable novel</h2>
<p>Why was the novel considered inappropriate for young girls, in particular? </p>
<p>Many Victorians considered it “<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-victorians-regarded-charlotte-bronte-as-coarse-and-immoral-and-deplored-jane-eyre-a6923616.html">coarse and immoral</a>”. Not only might the book encourage young girls to lust after darkly dangerous figures like Edward Rochester, it also seemed to promote rebellion through its orphan heroine who insists on her own worth and does not express gratitude for the “charity” extended to her.</p>
<p>The novel’s addictiveness might also have been an issue. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Book cover of Jane Eyre" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/442524/original/file-20220125-21-w8msmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Victorian parents were worried that Brontë’s sensational book would corrupt their daughters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin Classics</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The American reviewer EP Whipple coined the term “<a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4806331&view=1up&seq=403&skin=2021">Jane Eyre fever</a>"in 1848. Whipple satirically compared the way the novel had spread through the youth of America leaving "fathers and mothers much distressed”. The effects would have been less severe, Whipple suggested, if “some sly manufacturer of mischief” had not “hinted that it was a book no respectable man should bring into his family circle”.</p>
<p>In response to the Daily Mail’s request, a spokesperson for Salford commented that the university <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10382323/Read-Jane-Eyre-dare-University-students-given-trigger-warnings-classic-literature.html">does not give “trigger warnings”</a> but rather includes “content notes” on reading lists, which “give students the opportunity to have a discussion with their lecturer in advance if they wish to do so”. </p>
<p>The reading list in question also contained <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market">Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”</a>(1862), and <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46313/porphyrias-lover">Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”</a> (1836). Rossetti’s poem contains a sustained assault on a young woman by ferocious goblins, and Browning’s recounts the inner dialogue of a man before and during the moment he strangles his lover.</p>
<p>As Whipple hinted, it may be that rather than warning students off Jane Eyre and these other texts, such a label might single the novel out (unfairly) to student readers as being far more subversively exciting than its fellow Victorian counterparts – as has clearly been the case now for 150 years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175568/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Waugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite arguments that young children have enjoyed Jane Eyre for 150 years, the Victorians were much more concerned about the novel’s influence than universities are today.Jo Waugh, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, York St John UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1351242020-03-30T17:13:19Z2020-03-30T17:13:19ZFive novels from the Victorian era to give comfort in troubled times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324033/original/file-20200330-146724-1jxx671.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C15%2C5160%2C3430&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tennessee Witney via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The evolution of the novel and short story <a href="https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-realistic-novel-in-the-victorian-era/">in the 19th century</a> brought us one of the greatest human sources of comfort, besides food and a nice hot bath. When someone tells me they are planning to “curl up with a good book”, I am filled with a sense of peace on their behalf – of quiet enjoyment, perhaps accompanied by a little soft music and the crackle of a fire. </p>
<p>Regular solitary time is becoming the norm for many. Many of us are already tired of the enjoyable inanity of Netflix and Amazon Prime and are ready for something to lose ourselves in completely. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, the novel boomed as <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/themes/reading-and-print-culture">literacy and leisure time increased</a>. Novels were <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/victorian-readers">frequently published in weekly parts</a>, one to three chapters at a time. They had to be long enough to fill the required number of issues, and interesting enough to ensure readers kept buying the magazine or periodical (or run the risk of being cancelled mid-series). It is this combination that makes them a great resource for times like today.</p>
<p>Human beings are <a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180503-our-fiction-addiction-why-humans-need-stories">designed to love stories</a>. Our brains seek narratives to help us make sense of the world. We communicate using stories to exchange knowledge and gain understanding. As <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OlRjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT7565&lpg=PT7565&dq=fiction+is+to+the+grown+man+what+play+is+to+the+child&source=bl&ots=4uymm8f_3k&sig=ACfU3U2d7_yryl1iGI1_XjwaYEuv3PGrGA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS-7rlmcLoAhW1uXEKHf1VDPYQ6AEwHHoECC4QAQ#v=onepage&q=fiction%20is%20to%20the%20grown%20man%20what%20play%20is%20to%20the%20child&f=false">Robert Louis Stevenson wrote</a>: “fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child” – through fiction we learn by imaginative experience. </p>
<p>Stories help us gain insight into things we cannot or should not experience. They also keep us safe – we tell each other cautionary tales all the time. So let’s do as our NHS doctors and nurses ask and learn from their stories of the virus – while also tucking ourselves away with some great old novels:</p>
<h2>Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)</h2>
<p>An exciting and funny adventure story about a man who goes on holiday and ends up as temporary king of Ruritania. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rollicking Victorian adventure story.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Magnum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>London-born adventurer Rudolf Rassendyll is persuaded to pretend to be the king after the real king is kidnapped by his evil half-brother on the eve of his coronation. A distant relation of the royal family, Rudolf is the king’s spitting image.</p>
<p>Beautifully written and filled with energy, the story romps across the beautiful scenery of Ruritania to the mysterious castle of Zenda. Rudolf is one of the most vibrant and positive characters I have come across and will fill you with hope. But what will he do when he falls in love with the king’s beautiful fianceé?</p>
<p>Read it for free on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/95">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Florence Marryat: Her Father’s Name (1876)</h2>
<p>Cross-dressing, swashbuckling adventuress Leona Lacoste journeys from Rio de Janeiro to London to clear her father’s name. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cross-dressing derring-do.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unknown to her until his death, he has been in hiding in their Brazilian home, having escaped some scandal or crime in England. To get to the bottom of the mystery, Leona must stop at nothing.</p>
<p>Disguised as a man to make the journey possible in the 1870s, she proves herself onboard a ship in a dramatic duel and seduces the daughter of a rich industrialist. But what will she uncover about her unknown family history?</p>
<p>Read it for free on <a href="https://archive.org/details/herfathersnamea02marrgoog/page/n12/mode/2up">Internet Archive</a>, or buy from <a href="https://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/book/her-fathers-name/">Victorian Secrets</a>.</p>
<h2>Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1859)</h2>
<p>The celebrated mystery which launched a new type of story known as the sensation or enigma novel.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of the first classic thrillers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Walter Hartright is startled by the sudden appearance of a mysterious woman dressed in white walking on the road to London late at night. She asks him for directions and he decides to see her safely to a cab. </p>
<p>On the way, he discovers that she is from the very town to which he is about the journey to start work as an art teacher. Little does he know how this mysterious woman and the family in Limeridge will change his life forever.</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/583">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)</h2>
<p>This may seem an unlikely choice but don’t let the TV and film adaptations fool you. This is a seriously good book. The adventurers who track and foil Count Dracula, led by Mina Harker and Abraham Van Helsing, are the epitome of organised and resourceful Victorian society.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sink your teeth into this classic read.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This book is all about creating order from chaos: a reassuring ideal at the moment. Mina Harker’s way of life is doubly threatened by Dracula as he endangers both her fiancé, Jonathan Harker, whom he imprisons in his castle; and her best friend, Lucy Westenra, who is tormented by sleepwalking and mysterious illnesses.</p>
<p>Mina acts as the lynchpin for the five men who join together to defeat the count. The story that we are treated to is her collection of their accounts, creating a magnificent and lucid whole from diaries, cuttings, reports and letters. How will these rational beings thwart the supernatural power of the count?</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847)</h2>
<p>Jane Eyre fights for what she believes to be right. She stands up to those more powerful than herself, whether it be for her own rights or the good of others. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Romantic melodrama at its best.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orphaned and rejected by her guardian aunt, Jane trains to become a teacher at a charity school and then becomes governess to Adele, the ward of the wealthy and seemingly misanthropic Mr Rochester.</p>
<p>Slowly and unwillingly she falls in love with her master but he has a certain secret in his attic. What will this determined woman do to save herself from the temptations of his love?</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm">Project Gutenberg:</a>.</p>
<p>You’ll have noticed that I have stuck to books with happy endings, or at least tidy ones. There is no Thomas Hardy (you must take broadcaster <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/oldharrysgame/">Andy Hamilton’s advice</a> and read Hardy’s novels backwards to get a happy ending), and no George Eliot, whose wonderfully complex characters are very real and intriguing but not often comforting. </p>
<p>Some are old, familiar favourites, others lesser known but equally enjoyable. The list is by no means complete. It is intended to be the beginning of a journey back to familiar friends and an exploration of new ones. They are shared with love and care in the hope they will make you feel a little better for their company.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pam Lock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>And every one of them has a happy ending.Pam Lock, Lecturer, English Literature (Specialist in Victorian Literature and Alcohol), University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1262462019-11-18T14:01:02Z2019-11-18T14:01:02ZWhy do teachers make us read old stories?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300926/original/file-20191108-194650-13odlbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Teachers often assign older books.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/book-library-school-university-college-on-1444506608?src=bd16c503-99f0-4a1c-ba4a-9b2cf21e5301-1-6">vovidzha/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Why do teachers make us read old stories? Nathan, 12, Chicago, Illinois</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>There are probably as many reasons to read old stories as there are teachers.</p>
<p>Old stories are sometimes strange. They display beliefs, values and ways of life that the reader may not recognize.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://english.richmond.edu/faculty/egruner/">an English professor</a>, I believe that there is value in reading stories from decades or even centuries ago.</p>
<p>Teachers have their students read old stories to connect with the past and to learn about the present. They also have their students read old stories because they build students’ brains, help them develop empathy and are true, strange, delightful or fun. </p>
<h2>Connecting with the past and present</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Shakespeare wrote plays in the 1600s that are still read today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#/media/File:Title_page_William_Shakespeare's_First_Folio_1623.jpg">Martin Droeshout/Yale University</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Shakespeare’s <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html">“Romeo and Juliet</a>,” for example, teenagers speak a <a href="https://lingojam.com/EnglishtoShakespearean">language that’s almost completely unfamiliar</a> to modern readers. They fight duels. They get <a href="https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage.html">married</a>. So that might seem to be really different from today. </p>
<p>And yet, Romeo and Juliet fall in love and make their parents mad, very much like many teens today. Ultimately, they commit suicide, something that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/01/health/youth-injury-death-rate-cdc-study/index.html">far too many teens do today</a>. So Shakespeare’s play may be more relevant than it first seems.</p>
<p>Additionally, many modern stories are <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57225/11-modern-retellings-classic-novels">based on older stories</a>. To name only one, Charlotte Brontë’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm">“Jane Eyre”</a> has turned up in so many novels since its original publication in 1848 that there are entire <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/191995/summary">articles</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CmVQDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA189&dq=growing+up+empowered+by+jane&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjq2s_E3trlAhUBm-AKHcrtCHQQ6AEwAXoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=growing%20up%20empowered%20by%20jane&f=false">book chapters</a> about its influence and importance.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137539236">I found references to “Jane Eyre” lurking</a> in <a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B000FC1T8U&tag=bing08-20&linkCode=kpp&reshareId=GG4QQ034GJ68KKBAB615&reshareChannel=system">“The Princess Diaries</a>,” <a href="https://stepheniemeyer.com/the-twilight-saga/">the “Twilight” series</a> and a variety of other novels. So reading the old story can enrich the experience of the new.</p>
<h2>Building brain and empathy</h2>
<p>Reading specialist <a href="https://www.maryannewolf.com">Maryanne Wolf</a> writes about the “special vocabulary in books that doesn’t appear in spoken language” in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060933845/proust-and-the-squid/">“Proust and the Squid</a>.” This vocabulary – often more complex in older books – is a big part of what helps <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141021085524.htm">build brains</a>.</p>
<p>The sentence structure of older books can also make them difficult. Consider the opening of almost any fairy tale: “Once upon a time, in a very far-off country, there lived …”</p>
<p>None of us would actually speak like that, but older stories put the words in a different order, which makes the brain work harder. That kind of <a href="https://www.rd.com/culture/benefits-of-reading-books/">exercise builds brain capacity</a>.</p>
<p>Stories also make us feel. Indeed, <a href="http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2011/07/why-fiction-is-good-for-you/">they teach us empathy</a>. Readers get scared when they realize <a href="https://www.wizardingworld.com">Harry Potter</a> is in danger, excited when he learns to fly and happy, relieved or delighted when Harry and his friends defeat Voldemort.</p>
<p>Older stories, then, can provide a rich depth of feeling, by exposing readers to a broad range of experiences. Stories featuring characters <a href="https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf">from a diverse range of backgrounds</a> or set in unfamiliar places can have a similar effect.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ has been retold many times.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_Alice's_Abenteuer_im_Wunderland_Carroll_pic_23_edited_1_of_2.png">John Tenniel/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reading can be fun</h2>
<p>Old stories are sometimes just so weird that you can’t help but enjoy them. Or I can’t, anyway.</p>
<p>In Charles Dickens’ <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1400/1400-h/1400-h.htm">“Great Expectations</a>,” there’s a character whose last name is “Pumblechook.” Can you say it without smiling?</p>
<p>In Lewis Carroll’s <a href="http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/chapters-script/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/">“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</a>,” a cat disappears bit by bit, eventually leaving only its smile hanging in the air. Again, new stories are also lots of fun, but the fun in the older stories may turn up in those new stories.</p>
<p>For example, that cat returns in many <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781561458103">newer tales that aren’t even related</a> to Alice in Wonderland, so knowing the cat’s history can make reading that new story more pleasurable.</p>
<p>I won’t deny that some old stories <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/463520?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">contain offensive language</a> or <a href="https://isthmus.com/arts/books/laura-ingalls-wilder-little-house-reexamined/">reflect attitudes</a> that we may not want to embrace. But even those stories can teach readers to think critically.</p>
<p>Not every old story is good, but when your teacher asks you to read one, consider the possibility that you might build your brain, grow your feelings or have some fun. It’s worth a try, at least.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elisabeth Gruner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stories like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Jane Eyre’ are still relevant today.Elisabeth Gruner, Associate Professor of English, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1241282019-09-27T10:09:49Z2019-09-27T10:09:49ZJane Eyre translated: 57 languages show how different cultures interpret Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel<p>Translators are the unsung heroes of literature. Or, to be fair, largely unsung – they have a share in the International Booker Prize which <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/international">recognises author and translator</a>, who divide the £50,000 prize money and there is <a href="https://www.un.org/en/events/translationday/">International Translation Day</a> on September 30. It’s a chance to celebrate the small presses which publish translated novels and poems, as well as the amazing advances in online translation and, above all, the human translators whose skills matter now more than ever. </p>
<p>But let’s also remember that translation has always been an engine of culture. Literary classics – as well as modern bestsellers – reach more readers through translation than the language they were written in. Take Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: it has been translated into <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/maps/global-map/">at least 57 languages, at least 593 times</a>. </p>
<p>This changes how we think about Jane Eyre. What was a thoroughly English book – anchored to Yorkshire and published in 1847 – becomes a <a href="https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/blog/exploring-multilingualism/research-update-prismatic-jane-eyre-and-scriptworlds">multilingual, ever-changing global text</a>, continually putting down roots in different cultures. In Iran there have been 29 translations of Jane Eyre since 1980. When Korean is taught in a school in Vietnam, a translation of Jane Eyre is on the syllabus, as an example of Korean literature. </p>
<p>It also changes how we have to study the novel. I couldn’t hope to grasp Jane Eyre as a global phenomenon by myself, so everything I have found out has been thanks to a group of 43 co-researchers in many different countries, as part of the <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/">Prismatic Translation project </a></p>
<h2>Translation is creative</h2>
<p>People often think that translations are meant to reproduce their source texts, like a photocopier. But this is a long way wide of the mark, because of course every language is different. In fact, the process is much more complicated – and interesting. Because you can never say exactly the same thing in another language, translators use their imaginations to write the book again, only with different materials, for readers with different expectations. It is more like making a sculpture than taking a photo. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jane Eyre (Korean edition).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>You can see this right away from how the title gets re-moulded into different shapes. In Japanese in 1896 it became <em>Riso Kaijin</em> (An Ideal Lady – translated by Futo Mizutani), in Portuguese in 1941 it was <em>A Paixão de Jane Eyre</em> (The Passion of Jane Eyre – translated by “Mécia”). In Italian in 1958 it became <em>La porta chiusa</em> (The Shut Door – translator unknown) and in Turkish in 2010 it was rendered as <em>Yıllar Sonra Gelen Mutluluk</em> (Happiness Comes After Many Years – translated by Ceren Taştan). </p>
<p>My favourite of these metamorphic titles is the Chinese one invented by Fang Li in 1954 and copied by almost every Chinese translator since: two of the characters that can make a sound like “Jane Eyre” can also mean “simple love” – so the title says both those things together: <em>Jianai</em>. </p>
<p>Even small linguistic details can go through fascinating transformations. Take pronouns. In English, we only have one way of saying “you” in the singular. But even languages that are very close to English, such as French, German or Italian, do something different. They have a distinction between a formal “you” (<em>vous</em> in French) and a more intimate kind of “you” (<em>tu</em>). So in those languages there is the potential for a really important moment in the novel which simply can’t happen in English. Do Jane and Rochester ever call each other “tu”? </p>
<p>As it turns out, in French they don’t (or at least not in any of the translations we have studied). But in German they do. One of my co-researchers, <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/people/">Mary Frank</a>, has looked at translations from 1887 by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/934235.Marie_von_Borch">Marie von Borch</a> and 1979 by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/780039.Helmut_Kossodo">Helmut Kossodo</a>. She has found that, in both, Rochester only switches into the intimate form of you, “du”, when he first proposes. But Jane does not reciprocate. It is only in the amazing telepathic moment near the end of the book, when she hears Rochester’s voice calling to her across the moors, that she uses the “du” form of the verb to cry out the equivalent of “Wait for me!” Rochester’s tenderness is answered at last. </p>
<p>Should we think of this as a nuance added by the translators? Or as something that was all along somehow present in the English text, though invisible? What would Charlotte Brontë have done if she had been using German – or French (in which she did write essays and letters) with its different resources? These questions are probably impossible to answer – and if you turn to Korean, for example, which has many <a href="http://lbms03.cityu.edu.hk/oaps/ctl2011-4235-wky201.pdf">pronouns for different levels of formality</a>as I have learned from <a href="https://www.english.ucsb.edu/people/park-sowon-0">Sowon Park</a>, the picture gets even more complicated.</p>
<h2>Feminist passion</h2>
<p>Jane is “passionate” in all sorts of ways. When she is a child she resists bullying by her cousins and stands up for her rights at school; as an adult she feels passionate love for Rochester. “Passion” in the novel can suggest anger, stubbornness, suffering, generosity, desire and love. </p>
<p>By using the word in all these ways, Charlotte Brontë was making a feminist argument. She was saying that, for a woman in the early Victorian period, love did not have to be something passive, a matter of being admired. Instead, it was connected to anger and justice. It could be a means of self-assertion.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Farsi edition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This feminist charge in the novel is part of what has made it so popular across the globe. Throughout Europe in the mid-to-late 19th century, and throughout East Asia in the mid-to-late 20th, some translators and readers have been thrilled – others shocked. And of course, because the cultures and languages are different, the novel’s energies have had to be channelled in different ways.</p>
<p>Most languages have no single word that can cover the same range as Brontë’s “passion”, so they slice up its meanings differently. Interestingly, this often divides the angry (passionate) young Jane from her mature self, and connects her to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/jane-eyre-bertha-mason">Bertha Mason</a>, Rochester’s brutalised first wife who is locked up in the attic of his mansion. </p>
<p>In Persian – as <a href="https://bham.academia.edu/KayvanTahmasebian">Kayvan Tahmasebian</a> has found out – “passion” is translated by a wide range of words that separate the elements of love, desire, anger and excitement. You might view this as loss (the range of “passion” has disappeared!) but it is also a kind of gain (look at all these different nuances!)</p>
<p>The most famous sentence in the novel: “Reader, I married him”, is also one of the most provocative, as translations can help us see. In Slovenian – as researcher <a href="https://isllv.zrc-sazu.si/en/sodelavci/jernej-habjan-en">Jernej Habjan</a> tells me – it becomes the equivalent of “Reader, we got married”. Meanwhile, all the Persian translations we have seen so far have squashed Jane’s self-assertion – they give the equivalent of: “Reader, he married me”. Even today, Jane Eyre has a radical power. It will generate ever more translations.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124128/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Reynolds receives funding from the AHRC for 'Prismatic Translation', a strand within the Open World Research Initiative programme in Creative Multilingualism.</span></em></p>What was a thoroughly English book has become a multilingual, ever-changing global text continually putting down roots in different cultures.Matthew Reynolds, Professor of English and Comparative Criticism; Tutorial Fellow, St Anne's College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1078822019-01-21T18:40:16Z2019-01-21T18:40:16ZGuide to the classics: Wide Sargasso Sea<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250366/original/file-20181213-110264-yqxp2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Linen Market, Dominica, oil painting by Agostino Brunias, circa 1780</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agostino_Brunias_-_Linen_Market,_Dominica_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia Commons </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Charlotte Brontë’s novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Eyre">Jane Eyre </a>(1847) the marriage ceremony of Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax Rochester is spectacularly interrupted by the solicitor Mr Briggs declaring an impediment to the union: the prior marriage of Rochester to Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Spanish-town, Jamaica. Taken then, with others, to see the wife secreted in a third-story windowless room at Thornfield Hall, Jane remembers, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rochester later explains to Jane that Bertha is “bad, mad, and embruted”, of “pigmy intellect” and “giant propensities” toward the “intemperate and unchaste” which “prematurely developed the germs of insanity” passed on in the maternal line. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248643/original/file-20181204-126689-leamf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wide Sargasso Sea was first published in 1966.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bertha’s mother is a Creole. In the British Caribbean, Creole meant born in the region. Creole was not of itself a racial descriptor. Distinctions were made between white, coloured and black Creoles.</p>
<p>Author Jean Rhys, a white Creole, took umbrage with Brontë’s stereotypical depiction of Bertha. She was “vexed” by Brontë’s “portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester”.</p>
<p>In writing what she initially thought of as the story of the first Mrs Rochester, published in 1966 as Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys insists that her character Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester “must be at least plausible with a past” and that she needs to establish:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the reason why Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Sargasso Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean north-east of the Caribbean. Cut off from ocean currents, it is relatively becalmed and harbours drifts of sargassum seaweed. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250351/original/file-20181212-110243-150pdxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sargasso seaweed with waves and sandy beach.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sargasso_Seaweed_with_waves_and_sandy_beach.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Rhys’s novel, the Sargasso Sea is a symbol of what separates Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester and Edward Fairfax Rochester: disparate colonial and imperial histories and experiences; Rochester’s visceral racism and disdain for the mixing of cultures; his abhorrence and fear of the tropical landscape; and dispossession of Antoinette.</p>
<p>Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica in 1890, and lived as an expatriate in England and Europe from 1907 until her death in 1979. Wide Sargasso Sea was her fifth novel. </p>
<p>Her Welsh father William Rees Williams was a government medical officer who had settled in Dominica in the 1880s; her mother Minna was a white Creole whose family had lived for several generations in Dominica. Rhys’s great-grandfather James Potter Lockhart (1774-1837) had owned enslaved people and plantations. Rhys writes in her autobiography<a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/smile-please-9780141984544"> Smile Please </a>that as he “was a slave-owner the Lockharts, even in my day, were never very popular. That’s putting it mildly”.</p>
<h2>A prequel to Jane Eyre</h2>
<p>Told in three voices — those of white Creole, Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester, the young Englishman she marries, who implicitly reveals his own name to be Edward Fairfax Rochester when he renames her Bertha, and Grace Poole, Bertha’s keeper at Thornfield Hall — Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248648/original/file-20181204-126659-14yzvqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aorloff/11910184153/in/photolist-j9sNND-i8pYq5-dittB5-drQMvL-aAGnt5-8GkDwR-ajd1YZ-fFVydA-29x58Cq-H4ZfA1-2beP57q-9XUTu5-q4UMFc-maRhup-gAs3G2-bgs6eD-jhNTV5-awuFsC-jFf5H7-22EHH7N-9UhNnp-6Vca5a-9XPLTJ-9mV23n-9E7PTm-FLqcnn-aZLN6p-bD8azo-mkvuLv-JNY3hD-j5N5hn-dSGczX-WRLWbY-5Z5LmW-cWQ5d3-Xa3NHd-p1ZTSv-WR473f-jEVw68-39e1cg-9drMro-WEmBMo-ZBmNkF-dyNsN7-VHabZv-4xn8Na-nFheiv-TCNtyg-b7Pva8-5AVJr6">Alexis Orloff/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Internal evidence in Jane Eyre establishes that Brontë’s Rochester and Bertha marry in 1819 and that Jane Eyre returns to the ruins of Thornfield Hall and Rochester in June 1834. Wide Sargasso Sea, though, is set in the late 1830s and the 1840s.</p>
<p>Rhys’s choice of historical setting enables her to draw on and try to work her way through planter class and Lockhart family mythology about the economic and social impact of the abolition of slavery. </p>
<p>Historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite has described plantation slavery cultures as “race-founded & race-foundered”. Rhys’s ancestors, the Lockharts, kept family secrets about the massive debts owed by James Potter Lockhart. The British government paid financial compensation to slaveowners for the freeing of enslaved people. The monies James Potter Lockhart anticipated receiving were paid to his chief creditor in part payment of debt.</p>
<p>In Jane Eyre, Brontë uses Bertha’s monstrosity to question the morality of British divorce law, which keeps Rochester in a marriage in which coverture treats husband and wife legally as one person. </p>
<p>Rhys, rather, exposes the absence of a Married Women’s Property Act in Britain at the time the novel is set, the vitiating reach of the system of primogeniture by which property was inherited by eldest sons, and too convenient use of the criminalisation of <em>obeah</em>. <em>Obeah</em> comprises healing and spiritual practices which draw on African-Caribbean religiosity.</p>
<p>In Wide Sargasso Sea, the Rochester family and Antoinette’s stepfamily organise an arranged marriage between Edward and Antoinette. The Rochesters do this for a £30,000 dowry that will secure the prosperity of a second son and the Masons for kinship links to a landed English family. The Masons do not make a separate financial settlement on Antoinette, leaving her no means if she abandons the marriage. Rhys’s Rochester finds the arranged marriage unmanning.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248661/original/file-20181204-126668-1btar82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester in the 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jane-Eyre-1943-4.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Christophine, rumoured to be an <em>obeah</em> woman, has been both a slave and servant of the Cosway and Mason families and is hired when Antoinette and Rochester honeymoon at Granbois, an estate in Dominica. When Christophine confronts Rochester over his ill-treatment of Antoinette, Rochester threatens to report her to the local police if she does not leave immediately.</p>
<p>The Rochester figure thinks of Antoinette, “Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either”. He is tapping into common British ideas at the time of the degeneration of white people in the tropics, ideas still current into the 20th century.</p>
<p>Brontë’s Rochester’s use of the word “intemperate” to describe Bertha marks her Creoleness as a tropical identity. White Creole degeneracy was seen to be an effect of the tropical climate, the physical and social environment, living in close, domestic proximity to non-white people, and the corrupting influence of slave ownership.</p>
<p>Rhys likens phases of her work on Wide Sargasso Sea to making a “complicated” patchwork quilt: unpicking, cutting, repurposing, and stitching of material as part of a new narrative design. </p>
<p>Part of her countering of Brontë’s characterisation of Bertha is the setting up of similarities between Jane and Antoinette: social dislocation after the deaths of fathers; complex patterns of having surrogate mother figures; education at a girls’ school, Lowood in Jane’s case and a convent in Antoinette’s case after her mother Annette, grieving over the death of a son, is institutionalised as insane; and experiencing prophetic dreams, for example.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250367/original/file-20181213-110234-c45wsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color. Oil painting by Agostino Brunias.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agostino_Brunias_-_A_West_Indian_Flower_Girl_and_Two_other_Free_Women_of_Color_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rhys draws out the limits of the reliability of Antoinette’s and Rochester’s points of view. In Part One, Antoinette’s memories of childhood, the narrative highlights the narrow reach of her social experience and the ways her colonial values and language are shaped by reliance on the outlooks of her mother and her circle. Rochester finds the tropics and the fragility of European imperial enterprise disorienting and threatening. He fears being engulfed by them, by desire for Antoinette’s exoticism, and by the proximities of cultural and racial difference.</p>
<p>In developing the character of Rochester, Rhys draws not only on Jane Eyre, but also on William Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, and Charles Baudelaire’s <em>Le Revenant</em>.</p>
<p>At 76 and in poor health, Rhys won the W.H. Smith Award for Writers and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for Wide Sargasso Sea. She accepted a CBE in 1978. Rhys insisted that fame and greater financial security from prizes, royalties and writing grants came “too late” in life for her to enjoy fully. At her death Rhys was working on autobiographical vignettes which, edited by Diana Athill, were published in 1979 as Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.</p>
<h2>Adaptations of the novel</h2>
<p>Scenes from Wide Sargasso Sea were filmed for Sargasso! A Caribbean Love Story (1990), a University of the West Indies initiative. The 1993 Australian film of Wide Sargasso Sea was directed by John Duigan and produced by Jan Sharp. In 2006 Brendan Maher directed a telemovie of Wide Sargasso Sea for BBC Wales.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rHWyrz1vEAY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">BBC 2006, Wide Sargasso Sea telemovie.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rhys’s re-visioning of a classic has inspired writers from around the world to do the same and literary critics to theorise the dynamic of authors from colonial and ex-colonial cultures writing back to European texts and to examine the intersections of the treatment of ideas of racial, gender, sexual and class identities in women’s writing. </p>
<p>Wide Sargasso Sea has been seen, with John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), as originating neo-Victorian literature. Research on Rhys’s larger body of writing has been reshaping the field of New Modernist Studies.</p>
<p>Since the 1980s, Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys have often been made and remade, indeed celebrated in each other’s images. “Wide Sargasso Sea has literally wound its way into … subsequent rewritings of Jane Eyre”, comments critic Armelle Parey. </p>
<p>As examples, artist Paula Rego’s early 21st-century lithograph series Jane Eyre was shaped by her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea and Bertha figures are given humanity and a human voice in David Malouf’s libretto for Michael Berkeley’s chamber opera Jane Eyre (2000) and in Coral Lansbury’s Ringarra (1985), a reworking of Jane Eyre in a contemporary Australian setting.</p>
<p>Confined at Thornfield Hall, Rhys’s Antoinette longs for a favorite red dress which powerfully reminds her of her Caribbean home. Bertha Mason now often appears in red dress on stage, as in Polly Teale’s Jane Eyre (1997), which rapidly became the most performed adaptation of Brontë’s novel around the world and the 2015 National Theatre Live production of Jane Eyre broadcast by satellite to cinemas.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/248651/original/file-20181204-126659-35a9s4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph Taylor as Mr Rochester and Mariana Rodrigues as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/thelowry/39163213450/in/photolist-22EHGW7-6G1qs-9Xs6r8-c41GYN-cXhynN-cL98Uj-cL9ed5-nk6Y4x-ebFMMr-ebFMMD-bkbGvS-8qVD2E-8qVEew-8qVFE7-89789u-8qVJDW-7f4CvZ-dSVu26-7q1QVN-cKbHtf-U9cAgu-jeH6fj-5UWM2j-U9cCuh-tE5Tg-cL99RJ-fcYRDx-6Aad79-bGiVTi-4ppAmu-dxthgr-fcUasW-aQS8A2-fd48Zz-j3MB4z-8qSAf4-HJV81c-HFUNGN-HFUuA7-HjyLZQ-HFWx1d-GR88Kd-5ZNPAn-Jj43f-uork3-8PokVv-7GCVtX-aQS8Nr-9yK3XS-cL9aG1">The Lowry/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As my account of Rhys’s influence suggests, Wide Sargasso Sea has particularly engaged Australian writers, playwrights, filmmakers, sound artists and composers. Barbara Hanrahan’s narrative about Stella Edenbrough and Moak in The Albatross Muff (1977), for instance, is an allusive reworking of aspects of Antoinette’s relationship with Christophine and features colonial fortune-hunting.</p>
<p>Woman in the Attic (1987), by Gabby Brennan and Polly Croke, directed by Peter Freund, and performed by Whistling in the Theatre at the Anthill Theatre in Melbourne, blends adaptations of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Paul Monaghan directed and devised Obeah Night, performed at La Mama, Melbourne, in 1993. A combination of physical theatre, opera and spoken text, it is based on Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea.</p>
<p>Brian Howard’s opera Wide Sargasso Sea was performed by Chamber Made Opera in Melbourne in 1997, directed by Douglas Horton. Jennifer Livett’s Wild Island (2016) reworks both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in one of its plotlines.</p>
<p>Most recently Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod’s Crawl Me Blood, a sound and video installation, with a music track devised by Felix Cross, was staged in Hobart and Melbourne in 2018. Set in the Caribbean in 2018, the narrative develops motifs from Rhys’s novel to provoke audiences to think about the racialised legacies of colonialism there and in contemporary Australia.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107882/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sue Thomas receives funding from the Australian Research Council DP140103817. </span></em></p>Jean Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre explores the monstrous figure of Rochester’s mad wife Bertha, prompting readers to think about the racialised legacies of colonialism.Sue Thomas, Emeritus Professor of English, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/578022016-04-20T02:57:27Z2016-04-20T02:57:27ZWhy Charlotte Brontë still speaks to us – 200 years after her birth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119370/original/image-20160420-25625-6qef9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jane Eyre has been retold over and over again, but remains eternally relevant. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jane Eyre (2011), Focus Features</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What is it that makes generation after generation respond to Charlotte Brontë’s books, and in particular <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true&search_version=service">Jane Eyre</a>?</p>
<p>Brontë’s novels are bildungsromane, but they differ markedly from, say, the coming of age novels of Jane Austen. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119371/original/image-20160420-25631-2j7xhu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charlotte Brontë.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Evert A. Duyckinck, 1873. Courtesy of the University of Texas.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The education of the Austen heroine is a moral one, of a kind clearly mapped out for the reader. We know, through some very explicit signposting, that in order to move from the family home to marriage with “a single man in possession of a good fortune”, she must learn to temper sensibility with sense, or fight prejudice, or a tendency to meddle or be easily persuaded.</p>
<p>Brontë heroines, on the other hand, struggle with questions that are psychologically complex before they are ethical: how to refuse the temptation of a relationship where we are not truly loved; how to achieve respect without status; how to continue to care for the friend we envy. </p>
<p>The answers to such questions are not foreshadowed, and, scandalously for many of her first readers, they privilege principles of self-knowledge and self-expression over conventional Christian moralism. </p>
<p>Moreover, Brontë doesn’t give the impression that the eventual resolutions her heroines achieve are easily won, necessarily worth the sacrifice, or “universally acknowledged”.</p>
<p>As biographer and scholar Juliet Barker has noted,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All Charlotte’s heroines […] were orphans. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>They are not beautiful or rich (typically they must work to support themselves), yet they assert their right to a beautiful and rich interior life. </p>
<p>“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” Jane Eyre declares to Rochester.</p>
<p>Anyone, these books assure us, however little else they may have, can hold on to the integrity of their feelings. And they can seek to express them, with care and accuracy, in language.</p>
<p>Jane Eyre was Brontë’s first published novel, but not her first work of fiction. She and her equally precocious younger siblings Branwell, Emily and Anne, had been producing “little books” since Charlotte was 11. In The History of the Year, her second oldest surviving manuscript, written in March 1829, she tells:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds. When Papa came home it was night and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed and I snatched up one and exclaimed, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine’ When I said this, Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers. When Anne came down she took one also.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The toy soldiers were to initiate what the Brontë children referred to as “our plays”: extended games set in virtual worlds – Glass Town, Angria and Gondal – scripted in miniature books in minute handwriting. </p>
<p>The siblings went on writing these co-authored tales and poems until well into their twenties. They are notable not only for their early precocity of language but for their emergent, blatant eroticism. Their heroes are Byronic, and their heroines beautiful, wealthy and typically masochistic.</p>
<p>Although the Brontë sisters’ novels show traces of the romantic and gothic elements of these early experiments, “poor obscure, plain and little” Jane Eyre, and the cryptic, damaged and independent Lucy Snowe of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31173.Villette?from_search=true&search_version=service">Villette</a> (1853) are a far cry from such creations. </p>
<p>Once she began writing novels, Charlotte drew on memory as well as imagination, and the sumptuous settings of Angria gave way to a recognisable world of sharply visualised, everyday images: the “torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning” in Jane Eyre; Tartar the mastiff “snuff[ing] fresh flowers” spilled on the floor in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31168.Shirley?from_search=true&search_version=service">Shirley</a> (1849); simple pieces of furniture swimming into vision as Lucy Snowe in Villette recovers from illness. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Villette, by Charlotte Brontë, 1853.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Modern Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s these realist details, as well as the passionate struggles and feelings they anchor, that ensure that we hold Charlotte Brontë’s novels in mind long after we have closed their covers.</p>
<p>The Brontë sisters published their first poems and novels under pseudonyms – Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. While a collection of their poems, published in 1846, sold only three copies, the mystery of their authorship became an issue after the runaway success of Jane Eyre, which came out in the following year.</p>
<p>Readers and reviewers speculated, not just about the gender of the authors, but also as to whether they were indeed three, or one or two writers.</p>
<p>So began the complex entanglement, which continues to this day, of critical appreciation of the Brontë novels with biographical speculation. </p>
<p>Jane Eyre’s experiences at Lowood reproduce Charlotte’s at Cowan Bridge School. Both Villette and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31175.The_Professor?from_new_nav=true&ac=1&from_search=true">The Professor</a> (1857) draw on her time as first a student and then a teacher in the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. And Shirley’s Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone are revived portraits of Emily and Anne, both of whom died during the novel’s composition.</p>
<p>The temptation to multiply connections between art and life was given further impetus with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31171.The_Life_of_Charlotte_Bront_?from_search=true&search_version=service">Life of Charlotte Brontë</a> (1857) two years after Charlotte’s death, a work which attempted to curate Charlotte’s posthumous reputation and shield her from accusations of coarseness and lack of femininity. </p>
<p>Gaskell succeeded, however, in setting in place an enduring myth, of Charlotte Brontë the pious clergyman’s daughter from a sheltered Yorkshire village, whose scandalous depictions of female desire and outspokenness were the product of innocence rather than first hand experience. </p>
<p>It’s the thrill of each new reader, 200 years after her birth, to respond afresh to the startlingly modern psychology of her characters, the direct address of her first person narration and the sensuous immediacy of the 19th century world she so compellingly evokes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57802/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vanessa Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Charlotte Brontë’s heroines - most famously Jane Eyre - struggle with psychologically complex questions. And unlike Jane Austen’s female protagonists, they prize self knowledge and self expression over conventional moralism.Vanessa Smith, Professor of English, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.