Jane Eyre, Lady Nelson

Financial Times publishes a very interesting review of several recent biographies that are characterized by claiming the importance of overshadowed women or men behind the great figures. Mozart's women, Virginia Wolf's men... and more relevant to us Lord Nelson's first wife Frances. The reviewed book is Frances, Lady Nelson. The Life and Times of an Admirable Wife by Sheila Hardy.

The reviewer, Lisa Jardine, traces parallelisms between the story of Lord Nelson and Frances and Jane Eyre:

However many lost letters surface, we are never going to understand Frances, Lady Nelson in these 21st century terms. (...) .Rather than looking through a 21st century lens, we’re more likely to gain insight into the Nelson marriage if we turn to a near-contemporary - but fictional - account of love and marriage. The story Charlotte Bronte chronicles so vividly in Jane Eyre, published 50 years after the Nelsons’ estrangement, has much in common with Nelson’s story. In Bronte’s novel, Mr Rochester, like Nelson, marries a West Indian planter’s daughter, Bertha Mason, persuaded by the promise of money and station. He too has disowned his long-term wife for the immediate excitement of a passionate liaison. Like Nelson, Rochester rewrites the story of his marriage to condemn his wife and make his liaison with the “other woman” appear blameless.
So how does Bronte resolve the story to her 19th-century reader’s satisfaction? Rochester is allowed to atone for his moral turpitude by sacrificing himself in a vain attempt to save his wife’s life. Learning that Mr Rochester is not free to marry her because his wife is still living - the madwoman in the attic - Jane runs away. Some time later, she is drawn back to find that Rochester is now blind and crippled - trapped under the rubble of his own house as he tried to rescue Bertha from the blaze she has herself set. Jane can now enter into a guiltless marriage.
This, I suggest, is the kind of tale Lord and Lady Nelson would have recognised - how they thought about their own behaviour towards one another. Frances protests that Nelson’s unforgivable behaviour was entirely her own fault. And perhaps this 19th century fictional tale of loyalty explains too, why, in the midst of his affair with Emma Hamilton, Nelson apparently honoured his commitment to Frances, declaring publicly that the happiest day of his life had not been the one on which he gained a naval victory: “No, the happiest was that on which I married Lady Nelson.” To use Hardy’s otherwise fresh and original book to shed new light on Nelson, these are the kinds of clues we are going to have to look for.

If you want more Brontë and Nelson, just look here.

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë