The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  The success Jane Eyre enjoyed from its earliest days owes to Charlotte Brontë’s conscious awareness that, from the start, this is how she will work: Truth and Imagination, realism and fantasy each given their proper function in the creation of the whole. Both are intensely personal for her: the truth of her experience and the emotionally dominant claims of her imagination. And both, as she could not say to Lewes, are far too intimate for her to admit that they are hers.

  In the pages that follow, we will explore these twin sources of Brontë’s remarkable achievement. While she insisted that her invented protagonist had little relationship to her own life, in fact, just about everything that the novel reveals about Jane comes from Charlotte’s experience. Indeed, the title page is—perhaps intentionally—­quite accurate: this is “An Autobiography,” but one transformed into a novel.

  It is thus a book with a “secret history.” In one of the novel’s most amazing and self-revealing moments, near the end of the narrative, Brontë writes about this very topic, self-consciously and wittily presenting it in Chapter XXIX. A young, and very attractive clergyman, St. John Rivers, trying to help Jane, whom he has found near death from exhaustion, quizzes her about her past. Where did she come from? Whom did she know? Though she is at the moment totally dependent upon the sympathy of Rivers and his sisters, Jane crisply replies, “The name of the place where, and of the person with whom I lived, is my secret . . . ” He presses her: “Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you . . . ” Still, she stiffly preserves her silence. Her heroine is never more like Brontë than in this moment when Jane demands to keep her history secret. The novel’s heroine and the woman who invented her will face their crises alone, eschewing the help of others.

  Indeed, in this impulse to secrecy, Jane replicates one of the most autobiographical heroines of Brontë’s earlier writings—­Elizabeth Hastings in the novella Henry Hastings—which she had written back in 1839. Characterized as “a being made up of intense emotions,” which, “in her ordinary course of life [she] always smothered under diffidence and prudence,” persisting in the struggle “to keep wrapt about her the veil of reserve and propriety.” This, as we shall find in a wide variety of examples, is one of the dominant characteristics of Brontë’s personality. She was a woman who, most of the time, concealed her emotional life behind a mask of severe English “reserve and propriety.” But the passionate intensity was always there.

  In the pages to follow we will explore the dynamics of Brontë’s secret history. Her genius was to mingle memory and its forms of “truth” with the claims of imagination. In virtually every part of Jane Eyre we will see both.

  The truth of memory is itself a complex problem.

  In Jane Eyre Brontë takes the reader to the past “facts” of her own life. For example, to the Cowan Bridge School, where her father fondly and impractically sent her in 1824 when she was only eight years old. There she witnessed the sudden crisis in health that led to the deaths of her two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth. She draws upon her adolescent educational experience of 1831–1832 at a private school for girls where she met two of her lifelong friends, and her later return to that same school as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. She recalls her intensely unhappy experience working as a governess (1839, 1841). And, crucially, she returns to her life in Brussels from 1842–1843, a culturally alien environment where nevertheless she excelled as a student even as she was falling disastrously in love with her tutor.

  A “very limited” life from one point of view, little more than domestic scenes from a parsonage and the daily trivia of schools for girls—what, Brontë might have asked herself, is there in this kind of remembered “truth” to interest a reader? But Brontë’s novel uses what she recalls in a very personal way. Her memory transforms what we know to actually have happened into scenes of intense feeling and high drama alternating with equally touching moments of relief, tranquility, and affection. Everything is felt and rendered in terms of the emotions not only of the moment recalled but also of the moment when in remembering they are transcribed into narrative. For example, in Jane Eyre Charlotte describes a clergyman, administrator of a school for girls, as “a black pillar,” a “narrow, sable-clad shape,” a “carved mask.” This is how Charlotte Brontë, writing in 1846, remembered an actual man encountered in August of 1824 when she was age eight. His friends, still alive when the novel was published, were enraged at the depiction. But this is the truth of a child’s memory recalled by a grown and indignant woman, the kind of experiential truth Brontë was using, and which her letter to Lewes insists has its own validity.

  There are other, similarly highly personal and private sources for Jane Eyre. Brontë was an inexhaustible reader, and any consideration of her fiction must explore the impact reading had on her vision of the world and its meaning. Living in the home of Diana and Mary Rivers, Jane Eyre “devoured the books they lent me” and relished the “full satisfaction” found in discussing them in the evening. ­Walter Scott’s poem Marmion, then a “new publication,” announced for them “the golden age of modern literature,” and in her words we hear Jane Eyre’s excitement in the discovery of a new writer. That kind of personal experience is persistently significant as a source for Brontë’s novel. The scene of shared reading is a plain, literal report of Brontë’s decades-long experience of living in Haworth, reading, and talking about reading with her sisters and brother, as well as with her father and her aunt Branwell. And there was an unusual dimension to her experience of literature. While the family could share in the reading of contemporary writers like Scott and William ­Wordsworth, as well as classic writers like Shakespeare and Milton, they were also, uniquely, reading the works family members were writing. Her father, Patrick, had been publishing books of poetry and prose narratives from his early days as a young Cambridge graduate and continued to contribute letters to local papers on issues of the day. Charlotte had read the poems, and, when they were prepared for publication, the novels of her sisters; thus, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were all very much on Brontë’s mind as she worked on Jane Eyre, constituting worlds of imagining other than hers and of compelling importance to her. Of far greater significance, however, were the decades of writing she had shared with Branwell, which we have already seen to be at times far more “real” than her experience of daily life. Their co-created, darkly satanic Zamorna, the beautiful and vulnerable Mary Percy, the lavish and hedonistic life of ­Verdopolis, constituted a secret and powerful other world for her that existed simultaneously with daily life.

  A more ordinary record of true events and experiences, a more “realistic” narrative, emerges from the quite voluminous correspondence that Brontë carried on with her close friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. In Margaret Smith’s brilliant edition of her letters, we find writings that reveal Charlotte’s complex personality as they chronicle innumerable details of her daily life, her relationships with others, and her anger, hope, and dreams. Again and again, what the letters detail—daily chores, the weather, complaints about family members, the arrival of strange men, plans for visits to friends, feelings of frustration, fear of aging, questions about self-worth—are a reality that the novel takes up and transforms into fiction, Charlotte Brontë becoming Jane Eyre.

  What Brontë had experienced, remembered, labored over in her mind and in her emotion-laden interpretation of its significance is then joined, as she wrote Jane Eyre by those “bright pictures” extrapolated from the past as the basis for imagining things that never happened but that she longed for. From this process emerges scenes in which Jane is able to rescue relationships with lost family members, enjoy swift and easy success in school, triumph vindictively over women who had become her enemies, quickly win over her young pupil into an amiable docility when she was a governess, be discovered by a strangely attractive man who falls passionately in love with her, be surprised by the sudden announcement that she has inherited wealth from a forgotten relative
, and, in the end, enjoy marriage, prosperity, and independence on her own terms. One of the novel’s pleasing surprises is its skill in persuading readers that each of these imagined, hoped-for ends—which were never a part of Charlotte Brontë’s actual life—can be plausibly achieved.

  Brontë wrote Jane Eyre virtually in secret. There is absolutely no reference to her months of work on this project in her letters to friends; indeed, there isn’t the slightest suggestion that she is writing anything at all. There is no record of her telling her former co-writer Branwell about it. She surprised her father Patrick with news about the book only after it had been published and had received positive reviews. Indeed, it is reasonable to wonder how much her sisters knew of what she was doing. However, her friend and first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell wrote as if certain that at Haworth during their habitual nine o’clock evening exercise with its “steady pacing up and down the sitting room” Charlotte did talk with Emily and Anne as she was writing the novel, insisting “that the remarks [they made] had seldom any effect in inducing her to alter her work, so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality.” There couldn’t be a more curious and suggestive assertion than this one. What can Charlotte have meant by the term “reality,” given that the novel tells of a string of events she never experienced? That they struck her, nevertheless, as essentially a version of “reality” crucially suggests she was sure she had successfully responded to Lewes’ earlier critical concern and that her book achieved the effect of “Nature and Truth” that she had sought.

  When and how did she write? Some biographers believe Brontë wrote a substantial portion of the novel while in Manchester with her father, and others question how much she could have done there. Charlotte left no details.

  It would seem to make sense that once back home in Haworth she was able to concentrate on her writing. And yet her days there were from the first crowded with other, pressing demands on her attention. Charlotte wrote in the midst of a small, family home where it may have been difficult to be alone. She had to care for a convalescent and demanding father; to complete her usual, assigned household chores; to negotiate with two very different and strong-willed sisters, who were at times obsessively absorbed in their own writing; and to worry about a brother who was during this same period living much of the time in the nearby town of Halifax running up bar tabs at the local pub and progressively sinking more deeply into the alcoholism that would soon kill him. Indeed, while still in Manchester, she anticipated in a letter to a friend what this life would be like: “unhappily home is not now a place of complete rest,” she wrote; rather, it had become haunted by two phantoms, “Sin and Suffering . . .”

  There was one brief span of time, when she reached the scenes at Thornfield that “she could not stop . . . writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield, and was herself in a fever which compelled her to pause.” These scenes released powerful emotions so long pent-up that they consumed her. At other points in writing Jane Eyre she recalled, “Sometimes weeks or even months elapsed before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written.” Then, she had to rely upon the revelatory action of the unconscious in sleep and dreams to release further developments in the narrative. And so, “some morning she would waken up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision . . .” and she could write down “incidents and consequent thoughts, which were, in fact, more present to her mind at such times than her actual life itself.” Again, that assertion: more real than life.

  Because Charlotte Brontë was painfully short-sighted, she wrote her first drafts on small squares of paper that she held close to her face supported on the back of a board about the size of a book cover. Later she would copy what she had written onto letter paper. Only the final draft sent to her publishers in August of 1847 survives now. We have no outlines, notes about characters, drafts scribbled over with revisions and additions—all the sorts of fascinating first starts that many writers leave behind for us to pore over and to wonder at. Brontë’s need for secrecy seems to have driven her to destroy everything about the making of the book.

  When did she finish it? On March 16, 1847, she began making a fair copy of earlier parts of the novel. On the final page—as had been, since childhood, her compulsory practice on completing a text—she pens a date. This time it is 19 August 1847. She sent the manuscript to Smith, Elder, who had expressed a tentative interest, on the 24th. This manuscript in three, morocco-bound volumes, which features only minor alterations of punctuation and infrequent changes in wording, is now one of the treasures of the British Library in London. Notably, Brontë refused any suggestion that she revise a word of it, writing to Smith, Elder, “were I to retrench, to alter and to add now when I am uninterested and cold, I know I should only further injure what may be already defective.”

  Because of Charlotte’s characteristic secrecy there is no way of knowing the sequence of the composition of Jane Eyre. Did she begin with the first chapter, and end with the last? Her few, elliptical comments to Elizabeth Gaskell constitute all she was later to say about the making of the novel. They suggest she wrote the book in the sequence that we now have, opening with the ten-year-old Jane in an enraged fight with her cousin John Reed and concluding with her serene marriage to Mr. Rochester a little more than ten years later. Given this probable way in which the book was written, we can begin, in Chapter Two, to discern how Brontë learned to interweave “Truth” and “Imagination” as she progressed.

  2

  The Red-Room

  Manchester, England. August 25, 1846. Charlotte is living in rented rooms on 83 Mount Pleasant, Boundary Street, ­Oxford Road. Accustomed to the fresh air, isolation, and freedom of the family’s Haworth parsonage perched on a hilltop, she finds herself in a wholly different world. Hot weather. “Feelings of strangeness” in this unfamiliar “big town.” Outside only “those grey, weary, uniform streets where all faces” were “untouched with sunlight to her.” Acute pain from a toothache that had dogged her since her arrival kept her up at night. The “abominable” smell of coal gas making her feel sick “ten times a day.”

  Her father’s eye operation has been a success. Now, he is to be confined in a dark room for weeks to come, and Charlotte wearily realizes the time spent waiting to see if he recovers will be “dreary.” He is “a prisoner in his darkened room,” and so is she in an adjoining sitting room. This very day, she has received by mail the manuscript of her first novel, The Professor, accompanied by a publisher’s brief, curt note of rejection.

  At this moment, in this place, Brontë picks up her pen and writes, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

  These words begin Jane Eyre’s “Autobiography,” but they spring from this immediate moment in Brontë’s life. Trapped, she begins to spin an imagined tale that will permit her to escape. Here, at the very beginning of the novel, we watch the transformation. The rest of the paragraph depicts not the industrial midlands city of Manchester but a leafless garden, winter winds, somber clouds, and penetrating rain. Rural Yorkshire weather. The world of Brontë’s childhood. Though dark and cold, it’s somehow liberating. Charlotte is becoming Jane.

  Jane goes on, in the next sentences, to recall dreadful long walks on chilly afternoons, fingers and toes nipped by cold, heart saddened by a nurse’s chiding, her sense of physical inferiority in contrast to her abusive and self-centered cousins. An adopted orphan, keenly aware of how different she is from them, Jane Eyre has been excluded from the family, “a heterogeneous thing.” Living in a “very beautiful house” where, she is told, she has no right to live. Solitary, endangered, independent, the Jane Eyre of these first pages reflects many of Charlotte Brontë’s most painful memories of the past—of the eight-year-old child, the youngest pupil in the Cowan Bridge School roughly bullied by the bigger girls; of the twenty-three-year-old governess made to feel inferior and
insignificant in the pleasant home of a newly rich bourgeois family where she is expected to do mending and keep still; of the twenty-five-year-old English woman at a school in Brussels for girls learning French and feeling that “the difference in Country & religion makes a broad line of demarcation between us & all the rest.” Indeed the germ for the novel’s first paragraphs is Charlotte’s experience of unhappiness when she found herself trapped in situations where authoritarian and cruel older women tried to dominate her, and when in rebellion she opposed them: the abusive teachers at Cowan Bridge, the bossy Mrs. Chiswick of Stonegappe; and, particularly, the aloof and commanding Mme. Heger in Brussels. Charlotte’s rebellious spirit, emerging on the first pages of Jane Eyre’s narration, is at one with a nineteenth century spurred on by revolution and romanticism to celebrate tough individualism in a voice inspired by Byron and Scott.

  As the story begins, Jane has already begun her rebellion by trying to establish a separate place of her own. Excluded from the warm fireside of the Reed family, Jane has created a refuge behind the scarlet curtains. She is seated next to a window that looks out onto “a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub” a reflection of Jane’s inner life. The storm mirrors her internal rage at the Reeds and her resistance to their cruel treatment. With a book in hand, for the moment she can be alone. Alone, as Brontë is while she writes these pages, and so escaping from Manchester’s heat and smells, and the anxiety she feels for her father. This kind of moment was very familiar to Brontë. Many times in her life imagination had liberated her from similarly entrapping experiences. For example, ten years earlier, in 1835–1836, when she was nineteen to twenty years old, Charlotte worked as a teacher at the Roe Head school to help support her family. It was run by her generous-hearted former teacher Miss Wooler. Charlotte intensely disliked her work there, which she called “wretched bondage,” writing of her pupils “if those Girls knew how I loath their company they would not seek mine.” During precious and rare moments of escape from fellow teachers and students, just as Jane Eyre on a cold afternoon has escaped from the Reed family, so Charlotte would begin to free her imagination, writing extraordinary dream-like texts—a series of fragments that are now sometimes called “The Roe Head Journal.”