by Jessica Cox
While echoes of Jane Eyre pervade contemporary literature and culture, the novel has been subject to varying interpretations by adaptors and scholars. Screen adaptations in particular tend to emphasise the romantic aspects of the story. The character of the heroine is frequently transformed from ‘plain’ Jane into the stereotypical beautiful heroine, and Rochester into a brooding, romantic hero: the 1996 film version, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, used the tagline ‘This year’s most romantic love story’. Scholarly criticism, however, has increasingly highlighted the more problematic aspects of Brontë’s narrative – in particular the author’s representation of the mad wife, and Jane’s equally problematic (from a feminist perspective) union with Rochester at the conclusion of the narrative.
Charlotte Brontë’s life and works have resulted in a legacy that it is difficult to overestimate and which shows no signs of abating. The wealth of material inspired by Jane Eyre alone forms a direct retort to Southey’s assertion that ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be.’ Literature was to become the business of Brontë’s life, and her life and works in turn have become profitable businesses themselves.
Notes
1. Elisabeth Jay, Introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin, 2004), p. xxvi.
2. Cited in Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Phoenix, 1995), p. 42.
3. See Juliet Barker, The Brontës, p. 78 for further discussion.
4. Winifred Gerin, in her biography of Anne Brontë, suggests that Miss Branwell ‘ruled by a tyranny of spirit, exercising her dominion by a strong appeal to the emotions over which, in the case of children with such heightened imaginations, she had an easy victory’ and argues that she was partly responsible for the religious crisis Anne Brontë experienced later in life (Winifred Gerin, Anne Brontë: A Biography [London: Allen Lane, 1976], p. 35).
5. Advertisement for School for Clergymen’s Daughters, Leeds Intelligencer, December 1844 in Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters (London: Viking, 1997) p. 5.
6. Admissions Register of the Clergy Daughters’ School, Cowan Bridge’ in Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 7.
7. Mark 10:9; Matthew 19:6. Prior to the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, divorce was only possible through an Act of Parliament. The Act made it easier for couples to divorce legally, but opponents frequently cited the Bible as evidence that, from a religious perspective at least, divorce -the separation of those joined in holy union – was effectively impossible.
8. In Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. i65.
9. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2001) p. i.
10. Ibid, p. 2.
11. Jay, Introduction to The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. ix.
Select bibliography
A bibliography of Brontë biography and criticism would more than fill a volume of this size, so the list below is necessarily selective. There are numerous different editions of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, though critical editions such as Oxford, Penguin, Norton and Broadview are generally the most informative. There are dozens of biographies of Charlotte Brontë and her family; I include some of the most influential. The field of Brontë criticism continues to flourish: again, I have listed only a few of what I consider to be the seminal works in this field.
Allott, Miriam, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974)
Barker, Juliet, The Brontës (London, 1994); The Brontës: A Life in Letters (London, 1997)
Brontë Studies: Journal of the Brontë Society (Leeds)
Eagleton, Terry, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London, 1975)
Fraser, Rebecca, Charlotte Brontë (London, 1988)
Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1857)
Gérin, Winifred, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford, 1967)
Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979)
Glen, Heather, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (Cambridge, 2002); Jane Eyre (Basingstoke, 1997)
Gordon, Lyndall, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London, 1995)
Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago, 1986)
Ingham, Patricia, The Brontës (Oxford, 2006)
Kaplan, Cora, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms, (Edinburgh, 2007)
Miller, Lucasta, The Brontë Myth (London, 2001)
Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1988)
Rubik, Margarete, and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, ed., A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre (Amsterdam, 2007)
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (London, 1978); The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London, 1987)
Smith, Margaret, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford, 1995)
Stoneman, Patsy, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Hemel Hempstead, 1996); ed., Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898 (Aldershot, 2007)
Williams, Judith, Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (Ann Arbor, 1988)
Acknowledgments
Quotations from letters are taken from Margaret Smith (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), unless otherwise stated. Quotations from the works of Charlotte Brontë and from Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë are from the Penguin Classics editions unless otherwise stated. Quotations from reviews of the Brontës’ works are taken from Miriam Allott (ed.), The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).
Biographical note
Jessica Cox is a lecturer in English Literature at Brunel University She has published a number of articles on Victorian literature, including the work of the Brontës, and is the editor of the Penguin edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley.
