14 Boumelha, p. 73.
15 Boumelha, p. 74.
16 To Ellen Nussey [20 November 1840], in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), I: 234.
17 Brontë advises Nussey: ‘As to little Walter Mitchell – I think he will not die for love of anybody – you might safely coquette with him a trifle if you were so disposed – without fear of having a broken heart on your Conscience – I am not quite in earnest in this recommendation – nor am I in some other parts of this letter’ ( The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, I: 234).
18 John Gregory went so far as to recommend that, should a woman find herself in love, she should never reveal its true extent, even when married.
The fact that the woman has agreed to marriage ‘sufficiently shews [her]
preference, which is all [the husband] is intitled to know’ (p. 88).
19 Wollstonecraft, p. 119.
230 Notes
20 Wollstonecraft, p. 67.
21 Wollstonecraft, p. 183.
22 Wollstonecraft, p. 118.
23 The reference to a passion that ‘throbs fast and fully’ comes from Brontë’s famous criticism of Austen, whom she damns with the faintest of praise. She acknowledges in a letter to having read Austen’s Emma ‘ with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable.’ While admitting that Austen ‘does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well’, she complains that this ‘business’ is ‘not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and fully, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores’ (quoted in Rebecca Fraser, Charlotte Brontë [London: Methuen, 1988], pp. 363–4).
24 It comes as something of a shock much later in the novel when Rochester insists he would not have forced Jane to be his mistress (p. 489). The very possibility might make one reassess the calibre of a man who can conceive of such an option.
25 In one of the first studies to deal at length with Jane Eyre’s debt to Richardson’s Pamela, Janet Spens’s essay on ‘Charlotte Brontë’ draws extensive parallels between the two works but distinguishes between Jane’s portrayal as ‘a sympathetic and really virtuous heroine’ and Pamela’s as ‘a designing minx’ ( Essays and Studies, ed. H. W. Garrod [London: Clarendon, 1929], pp. 60–1).
26 See, for example, Step 3 of Janice Radway’s 13 ‘logically related functions’
in the romance plot of today’s mass-market fiction: ‘The aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine’ ( Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984], p. 134).
27 Jane’s resolute refusal to entertain fairy tale possibilities actually blinds her to what in reality is going on in Thornfield. When Mrs Fairfax had first shown her over Thornfield Hall, Jane likens the third storey to ‘a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’ (p. 122). But she resists the spell of the fantastic, even when that observation followed by a ‘preternatural’ laugh that echoes its ‘clamorous peal’ in every lonely chamber (p. 123). Jane not only rejects Rochester as a potential Bluebeard; she also displays none of the curiosity of Bluebeard’s wife. Given the brave spirit, penetrating eye, and lack of timidity that St John later congratulates her on, her docility in this instance might be considered somewhat out of character, but her resistance to fairy tale possibilities does have effect of masking the nature of the story she herself is acting out.
28 In Brontë’s Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre she defends the novel against those who think that ‘whatever is unusual is wrong’ by reminding her readers of ‘certain simple truths’: ‘Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last’ (p. 5).
29 Newton, p. 73.
30 Such conversations can also be seen as participating in the development of the novelistic fiction that redefines what a man wants as a woman to talk
Notes 231
to. It is certainly one of Jane’s chief attractions, not only for Rochester, but also for St John, who, after discovering that he and Jane are cousins, concedes that he can love her as a sister, telling Jane: ‘your presence is always agreeable to me; in your conversation I have already for some time found a salutary solace’ (p. 433). Interestingly, the attraction of someone to talk to seems to be the only convincing explanation that Henry Crawford can give for the appeal of Fanny Price in Austen’s Mansfield Park: ‘I could so wholly and absolutely confide in her’, he tells his sister, ‘and that is what I want’
([London: Penguin, 1996], p. 243).
31 The risk is increased further by the echo of Rochester’s earlier frantic plea for Jane to accept his lawless embrace: ‘Oh! come, Jane, come!’ (p. 357).
32 In Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), Alison Case observes that Jane abdicates agency at all those ‘moments that most decisively move her “plot” forward’, not only with Rochester’s call but also with ‘the image in the moon that tells her, “My daughter, flee temptation!”’ when she tears herself away from Rochester after the aborted marriage, and earlier still at Lowood, when she is trying to work out how a person goes about finding employment as a governess, with the ‘kind fairy’
that she says must have ‘dropped the required suggestion’ on her pillow (p. 105).
33 Gordon, p. 144.
34 Emily Henrietta Hickey, ‘In a Nutshell’, ll. 1– 2, in Chadwyck Healey Literature Online
comes from her first collection, A Sculptor, and Other Poems, published in 1881.
35 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 375.
Dorothea’s ‘third-best’ wish is her marriage to Will, the deflation of her grander aspirations charted in the transformation of a ‘little speech of four words’ (p. 484) that echoes throughout the novel, from ‘What could she do, what ought she do’ (p. 24), to ‘What shall I do?’ (p. 225), to ‘Tell me what I can do … think what I can do’ (p. 238), to ‘What should I do – how should I act now’? (p. 644), until she finally settles for ‘this is what I am going to do’ (p. 670) – that is, marry Will and become his help-meet and fellow labourer.
36 Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 321, 680, and 7. The epigraph to chapter one is from Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (1619).
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