The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  The tragedy of Maria’s life haunted Charlotte. Her knowledge of what Maria had suffered, and that she had not been with her when Maria died, must have seemed a kind of betrayal, a fault which called out for expiation. The ghost of this past, like the ghost of Mr. Reed, haunted the dark red-room of Charlotte’s inner consciousness. Sometimes this recurrent obsession took unexpected turns. One of Charlotte’s best friends from Roe Head, Mary Taylor, recalled that early one morning Charlotte told her that she had been troubled the night before by a dream:

  [S]he had been told that she was wanted in the drawing-room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth . . . she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely; they were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. They were very fashionably dressed, and began criticizing the room, etc.

  Brontë was fascinated by dreams and includes in the novel her own dramatic fictions of dreaming, such as Jane Eyre’s premonitory dreams from Chapter XXI of a troubling infant, a presentiment of changes which are to occur in her life. However, this disturbing account is quite different in its laconic presentation. It has all the characteristics of an actual dream in the way it takes the dead sisters and makes them remote, censorious, and uncaring, emblematic perhaps of Charlotte’s fears about the inadequacy of her past relationships to them and her guilt because she is still alive.

  Charlotte went on, a few years later, in her fantasy Angria writings to invent characters and scenes which restage elements of her relationship to Maria, which are, if anything, even more unnerving than her dreams. In 1836 she wrote of a fictional character Jane Moore, quite different from Jane Eyre in almost every way. In one scene, however, on a moonlit evening she is alone in her father’s grand house and, as in an abstracted reverie, she thinks about the death of her older sister years before. Jane Moore remembers “the rigid and lengthened corpse laid in its coffin on the hall-table . . . of the kiss that she herself was bidden to give the corpse, of the feeling which then first gushed into her childish and volatile heart that Harriet had left them for ever.” Brontë had been reimagining the deaths of her sisters for years. The creation of Helen Burns gave her another opportunity to reincarnate Maria.

  As Helen comforts Jane after Brocklehurst’s cruel indictment of her as a liar, suddenly “another person came in. Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising wind, had left the moon bare: and her light, streaming in through a window near, shone full both on us and on the approaching figure which we at once recognized as Miss Temple.”

  It’s a crucial moment in the novel and in Charlotte’s inner life.

  Maria Temple greeted Jane upon her arrival and has interceded again and again on behalf of the girls about their hunger. When Brocklehurst denigrates them, she has been a calm and caring presence in the background. On this night she seeks Jane and brings both girls to her apartment. She consoles Jane for her public shaming, calling her “my child” and putting her arm around her. She allows Jane to clear herself of being condemned as a liar by telling her life story and then she kisses her. She gives Jane and Helen tea and generous slices of cake so welcome to “our famished appetites”—thus countermanding the starvation of Lowood school’s discipline through pleasure. At the end of the evening, she embraces them both in parting as “my children.”

  Miss Temple is another character reborn from Charlotte’s past life. There were, in the Brontë family, two Marias. Her sister was named Maria after her mother who died when she was seven and Charlotte five. The novel has called forth this second restless spirit from the past. Illuminated by the moon, like the Greek goddess Diana, she comes to protect her virginal daughters, to feed, comfort, and counsel them.

  Her mother haunted Charlotte as well. How could she not, dying slowly and painfully when Charlotte was living at home and was an intensely impressionable young child?

  In the family she was remembered as lively, loving, and beautiful. Patrick kept and treasured Maria’s love letters, written to him when they were courting, in which she wrote of her anticipation of the “sacred pleasure . . . [and] perfect and uninterrupted bliss” of their forthcoming marriage. In 1830 the fourteen-year-old Charlotte carefully copied an old profile portrait of her mother, subtly altering some of the details to picture her as a pert, youthful figure, her ­flattering curling hair naturally springing from a cap, her dress with a frilled collar exposing a long white neck and empire dress with a generous breast. Charlotte imbues Miss Temple with the warmth of her mother and has Temple represent everything Brocklehurst sought to repress and cut off.

  In this scene of Jane with Helen and Miss Temple, Charlotte imagines what it might have been like if her mother and sisters had not died: time spent confiding in them, conversing over the sweetness of cake, and hearing her older sister and mother discuss their ideas and the books they had read. It is a moment to embrace them in fiction.

  At Lowood, however, it is just a passing moment. As the weather warms and Jane’s health improves, typhus invades the school. Lowood’s physical environment is asserted as the cause of the illness; the fetid and poisoned air itself seems to carry sickness. The disease spreads quickly to many of the girls.

  The cowardly Brocklehurst refuses to come near the school and the cook flees, replaced by a kinder one. Miss Temple courageously nurses the sick and dying girls. The recollections of a nurse who actually worked at Cowan Bridge describe a similar scene. She found the “girls lying about; some resting their aching heads on the table, others on the ground; all heavy-eyed, flushed, indifferent, and weary, with pains in every limb.” Hovering over all, as she recalled, was a “peculiar odor,” which indicated to her this was “the fever.”

  Helen, too, is ill, but not with typhus. Her constant cough tells us that hers is a different illness. Tuberculosis was already in the Brontë family. Sister Maria was dangerously ill from it in February of 1825; taken home she died of it on May 6, age eleven. Elizabeth too was ill with it and returned May 31. It is not clear whether Charlotte and Emily returned to observe Elizabeth dying; her death came June 15, age ten. Charlotte had just turned nine years old.

  At eleven at night Jane finds her way to Helen in Miss Temple’s room guided by what has already become the highly symbolic “light of the unclouded summer moon.” Driven by feelings of sisterhood, she is overwhelmed by her impulse: “I must embrace her before she died, – I must give her one last kiss, – exchange with her one last word.” Brontë is now able through imagination—notice the repeated need of “I must”—to atone for her former absence and be with her sister Maria for her last hours of life, looked over and comforted by the lingering presence of her remembered mother. It is Maria as Helen who calls her to “nestle” together and puts her arm around her. It is Maria as Helen who consoles Charlotte: “the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest.” She voices a belief in a loving God as a “mighty, universal Parent” and in a “region of happiness” after death.

  Helen’s last words are of concern about Jane: “Are you warm, darling?” After a kiss, they fall asleep embracing.

  The next morning Miss Temple returns from the sick room to find Jane, “my face against Helen Burns’ shoulder, my arms around her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was—dead.”

  The powerful confluence of private, indeed secret, emotions in this scene—guilt and grief because of the past and her former incapacity and inaction are now replaced by an imaginative transformation of the “truth” into a deeper “Truth” of sisterhood, love, and consolation. These are precisely the kinds of profound parallels to her life that Charlotte Brontë refused to acknowledge in public. Yet she could not help but embed the innermost feelings of her heart into her fiction. At points such as this, Brontë’s need to write a secret history is most evident in the contradictory character of her impulses. She needs to write publicly about her loss, sorrow, and desire—these emotions give the scene its power—and yet she doesn’t wish readers to know they are her emotions, emerging from the trag
edies of her childhood. As an artist she achieves a dramatic balance between a truth that is historically based and, at the same time, a Truth that is from a compensatory imagination which atones for and consoles what had been a desolation.

  If life had been unjust to her in the tragedies of her childhood, Brontë now corrects that injustice through the recuperative power of her imagination.

  4

  The First Girl

  Time moves quickly after the death of Helen Burns. Jane Eyre claims this will not be a “regular autobiography” and skips over the next eight years of what Jane calls her “insignificant” life. In passing, she notes that the deaths of several Lowood students prompt public indignation, and the school is so completely reformed that she remains for six years as a pupil and for two as a teacher.

  Charlotte Brontë’s own life was far different. While it is true that Cowan Bridge School was reformed, it wasn’t until 1832 that it was moved to a new and more salubrious site, long after Patrick Brontë brought Charlotte and Emily back to Haworth.

  From August of 1825 to January 1831, Charlotte spent not in a boarding school, but living with her family. When she was almost fifteen, she returned to formal education in a private girls school run by Miss Wooler: Roe Head. While she remained there for a scant year and a half, leaving in June of 1832 to live at home again, her world had changed. She had made new friends at Roe Head. Young women from families of substantial wealth and education, possessing good minds, high spirits, and expectations for the future. They corresponded, sent each other presents, visited each other’s homes, and went on short trips together. Altogether between the ages of fifteen and nineteen Charlotte matured into the grown woman we see replicated in her heroine Jane Eyre.

  Charlotte’s and Jane’s personal development are interesting to compare. As we scan the important aspects of this crucial process, we can see some striking instances of the novelist selecting from remembered experiences, sometimes reporting the facts of her past, and at other times letting her imagination freely project choices and consequences that had not been a part of her life.

  This process of development is anticipated quite early in the novel. Following her confrontation with Mrs. Reed, Jane escapes into the wintry garden at Gateshead whispering to herself, “What shall I do?” The servant Bessie finds her and wonders at this “little, roving, solitary thing.” As they talk, Bessie notes the frank, self-confident, and dispassionate tone of Jane’s remarks and says, “You little sharp thing! you’ve got a new way of talking. What makes you so venturesome and hardy?” The child’s victory over the older, dominating Mrs. Reed has brought forth a sureness in judgment and a kind of intrepid fearlessness. The way Jane talks suggests to Bessie that this child has a new toughness and a willingness to take risks.

  The novel’s readers already know this voice. The Jane Eyre who tells her life story is in her early thirties. While she can evoke the emotions of a moment from many years earlier as she writes, she can also look back with the wisdom of experience and of a mind and spirit that time and challenges have shaped. Taunted, hit, and injured by John Reed, the well-read little ten-year-old can cry out, “You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!” At the same time the narrator can wryly remark of that moment of fury and indignation that she had read Goldsmith’s ­History of Rome and had “formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c.” Young Jane, struggling to make sense of the injustice in her life, makes what now seems to her more mature self a slightly amusing and exaggerated parallel, and Jane Eyre, as narrator, can judge with wit both her youthful self and the boorish opponent she confronts on that dark, formative afternoon of the first chapter. Her “way of talking” frames and shapes her account of her life, constantly suggesting to the reader that though seemingly small, roving, and solitary, she will, in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, achieve what she chooses.

  For Charlotte, life at Haworth, after Cowan Bridge, became a place that nurtured the free development of her mind and voice through reading and lively discussion while at the same time offering her the opportunity to playfully liberate her imagination to express itself through drawing and writing. We can see this happening, as well as how the voice of Jane Eyre begins to emerge, by looking at a couple of Brontë’s writings from 1829 when Charlotte was twelve and thirteen years old.

  In an utterly charming prose snapshot, her second earliest surviving manuscript dated March 12, 1829, written a month before her thirteenth birthday, which she titled “THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829,” Charlotte begins describing a typical afternoon at home. Papa and Branwell have gone to the nearby town of Keighley to pick up the latest copy of the Leeds Intelligencer. It’s one of three newspapers, she notes proudly, that they take each week, while also borrowing from a neighbor his copy of Blackwood’s Magazine, which she calls “the most able periodical there is.” The servant Tabby is washing up in the kitchen. Anne is looking at the cakes Tabby has just baked. Emily is in the next room brushing the carpet, while Charlotte writes at the kitchen table. Blackwood’s makes her think of the Brontë children’s imitations of that magazine in their fantasy writings. She lists and dates them, calling them plays, and remarking, “All our plays are very strange ones.”

  It’s important to note, first, that Patrick Brontë, father of this remarkable family, was a very public man. Much more than simply a parish priest in Haworth, Patrick frequently argued his views on the most hotly debated issues of the moment in local papers. Between January 15 and February 5 of 1829 he had published three letters in the Leeds Intelligencer controversially arguing for the Catholic Emancipation bill as “an antidote” to the political extremism currently stirring in Ireland, which, he feared, could lead to “popular violence” and the danger of Irish secession from Great Britain. Juliet Barker’s astute analysis of his position points out that while what he wrote was contrary to the convictions of most of his local political allies, he had taken a position in favor of limited rights for Irish Catholics, whom he himself did not trust, for the sake of preserving the unity of the Kingdom. The figure which their father thus struck was of intense interest to his children. This issue, like many, was vigorously discussed at home. Patrick wishes to pick up the paper on this day at least in part to see what the most recent news reporting has to say about it. The king’s speech in favor of Catholic emancipation in February had been followed by Robert Peel, at the time home secretary, introducing “The Roman Catholic Relief Act” in the House of Commons, and by March it was before the House of Lords. It was the burning issue of the day, and something Patrick was deeply invested in.

  Charlotte frames Patrick’s intellectual and political activity within the sweetly mundane activities of home life. Her references to the children’s fantasy plays and their strangeness then leads to ­Charlotte recording a crucial moment three years earlier. In June of 1826 Patrick had brought from Leeds a birthday present for ­Branwell, a box of toy soldiers. The next morning his siblings began snatching them up as their own and naming them. Charlotte assures the reader hers is “the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part.” She names him the Duke of Wellington. ­Branwell, always the ready antagonist, names his “Buonaparte.” Thus into their childish play the young Brontës weave their own rivalries—whose is the best?—and protagonists from recent history which was so much a part of their intellectual world. In her writing, Charlotte illustrates her early delight in the particulars of daily life—those tempting cakes now cooling on the kitchen table—in the picturing of individual people—the young Anne sniffing at them—and a precocious self-confidence in judgment that shows her eagerly open to intellectual risk: Blackwells is the best, no question.

  In the voluminous writings that soon follow there is frequently a sense of fun, yet coupled with a remarkable range of allusions, not only to contemporary politics but also to Scipio Africanus, Socrates, Ovid, Virgil, and Herodotus. The Brontë children ransacked their father’s library shari
ng what they learned with each other.

  A story titled “An Adventure in Ireland,” written just over a month later and dated April 28, 1829, already illustrates Charlotte’s self-confident narrative voice, while uncannily anticipating several of the crucial elements of Jane Eyre. With the privilege of hindsight we can see the adult novelist in training. The unnamed first-person narrator visiting a remote part of Ireland is impressed by the beauty of the evening and a lake “in which the reflection of the pale moon was not disturbed by the smallest wave.” Over the nearby village “the grey robe of twilight” is stealing. Nothing breaks the stillness of the scene but “the hum of the distant village” and the “sweet song of the nightingale in the wood.” Brontë shows that she is already capable of evoking the quality of time, place, and the mood of a specific moment. She unconsciously anticipates the moment in chill twilight when Jane and Mr. Rochester first meet.

  The scene set, the narrator is greeted by a polite local who invites him to spend the night in his “castle,” which turns out to be in some ways quite like the future Thornfield, a large building superintended by an old lady, anticipating Mrs. Fairfax, sitting by the fireside knitting, her tortoise-shell cat nearby. Retiring for the night, the narrator is accosted by a boy who warns the room is haunted, much like the red-room at Gateshead, by the “ould masther’s ghost,” and as the narrator falls asleep, he thinks he can see “something white through the darkness,” just as Jane Eyre will later.