Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 in Thornton, near Bradford
in Yorkshire. The daughter of a Northern Ireland-born Church of England
clergyman — Patrick Brontë — and the Cornish-born Maria Branwell, Charlotte and
two
of her four siblings (Emily and Anne) have long been
recognized as among the greatest novelists in the English language, and Jane
Eyre as perhaps
the most important of their works.
The experience of Jane Eyre is partly modeled on Charlotte’s
own life. Her father moved to Haworth in 1820, the year before his wife’s
death, when Charlotte was still a small child. The bleakness of the moorland
surrounding Haworth, the relative poverty of the family’s existence, and the
sense of early personal loss — all features that are to be found in Jane Eyre —
must all have colored Charlotte’s upbringing. Moreover, a harsh aunt —
Elizabeth Branwell — soon came to live with the Brontës, after the death of her
sister. It is evident that Mrs. Reed, in the novel, is a very lifelike figure.
Perhaps the most influential episode in Charlotte’s brief
life — she died when just 39 — was her time in Brussels between 1842 and 1844,
where she stayed in a pension in order to improve her French and German, and to
develop her skills as a teacher of English. There she developed what seems to
have been
an unrequited passion for the married owner of the hotel,
Constantin Heger.
By 1845, back in England, Charlotte was encouraging her
sisters Emily and Anne in their writing, both poetry and fiction. She tried to
publish her novel,
The Professor, but it was rejected and did not appear until
1857 after her death. But her publisher encouraged her, and Jane Eyre appeared
in print in October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell. She published Shirley
in October 1849 and in 1853 Villette, a novel that drew heavily upon her life
in Brussels.
Jane Eyre, the novel, is a remarkable exploration of the
mind and emotions of a passionate, strong-willed woman who is determined to
live by her own principles and ethics. If that sounds a remarkably contemporary
summary of a novel published almost 150 years ago, that is to the credit of
Charlotte Brontë’s astonishing maturity and lasting genius. Although the core
of the novel is Jane Eyre and her own internal life, the other characters — Mr.
Rochester in particular — are wonderfully depicted. The tale is also a splendid
debunking of earlier 19th century gothic fiction, yet manages to tingle the
spine and stir the hairs on the back of the neck. It is unbeatable, both as
pure entertainment and as a lasting example of subtle imagination. We should
not forget, of course, that it is also one of the greatest love stories ever
written. Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre will last forever.
Notes by Gary Mead
Emma Fielding
Emma Fielding trained at RSAMD. She has worked for the Royal
National Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and the RSC in Twelfth Night and
John Ford’s The Broken Heart, for which she won the Dame Peggy Ashcroft Award
for Best Actress. A frequent reader on Naxos AudioBooks, Fielding has also
appeared in numerous radio plays.
