Pre and Post Jane Eyre

Two recent articles published in The Times with pre and post Jane Eyre topics.

Pre-Jane Eyre.

Margaret Reynolds reviews the two recent additions to Charlotte Brontë's published juvenilia: Heather Glenn's selection for Penguin: Tales of Angria and the most recent Hesperus publication: The Secret. Both were already presented on this blog months ago.

In the early 1840s, Charlotte Brontë wrote a memorandum about a new story: “Time — 30-50 years ago. Country — England. Scene — Rural. Rank — Middle. Person — First . . . Villains: NB. Moderation to be observed here.”

Hitherto, her fiction was set in exotic cities and her characters aristocrats. Ever since the day that their father presented Branwell with a set of lead toy soldiers, the four Brontë children had invented a world for them — Emily and Anne’s was Gondal, Branwell and Charlotte’s was Angria. They were written in tiny homemade books, some still in the Brontë museum.

Few of these stories have been available until now, but Heather Glen has transcribed five Angrian romances. The Secret also includes Lily Hart (1833): “Lily was handsome enough to attract the attention of any man . . . Dark, bright eyes, softened by long, silken lashes . . . harmonised well with the wild black curls . . .”

It is very different from the world of Jane Eyre, but some of Angria did go into Brontë’s later work. In Mina Laury (1838) the heroine describes her feelings for her lover: “I have never in my life contradicted Zamorna — never delayed obedience to his commands — I could not . . . he was sometimes more to me than a human being — he superseded all things.”

Jane Eyre said much the same about Rochester: “My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: I could not, in those days, see God for his creature of whom I had made an idol.”

When Charlotte took her own advice about moderation and wrote her first novel, The Professor, she produced a book so dull that her publisher asked for something with “more incident”. She kept some of her rules but added in Angrian extravagance. Reader, the result was Jane Eyre.

Post-Jane Eyre

Dinah Birch reviews Philip Waller's Writers, Readers and Reputations. Literary life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford University Press). One of the highlighted books seems to be an offspring of our Jane: Florence Barclay's The Rosary.

No one could claim that Florence Barclay, the daughter and wife of a clergyman, dedicated mother of eight children, and spectacularly successful novelist, was a prophet of feminism. Barclay was pious, hearty and homely. She was a late starter, and had reached her mid-forties before The Rosary (1909) made her a publishing prodigy. 150,000 copies were sold in the first nine months; 1 million by 1925. It is a book that few remember. Even Philip Waller, the champion of the unread, is a little condescending about it. Yet The Rosary has power. Its heroine, Jane, is one of the countless literary daughters of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – an orphan, overlooked and plain, she finally gets her man after a series of misfortunes and misunderstandings. But Barclay’s version of the solitary Jane has none of her predecessor’s quietly barbed deference. This Jane is forceful and commanding, and speaks her mind. Nor does she share Jane Eyre’s elfin stature. She is sporty (a formidable golfer) and rather stout, and has no truck with the delicate conventions of femininity. A white wedding will not do for her: “I should look like a Christmas pantomime. And I never wear veils, even in motors; and white satin is a form of clothing I have always had the wisdom to avoid”. Though she is devoted to the care of others, and especially to the support of her husband (who, like Rochester, must be blinded before he can win his bride), she serves on her own terms. So did Jane Eyre, and The Rosary is another testament to the durability of Victorian writing. But the forthrightness of this quasi-masculine heroine makes her sustained popularity interesting. Hardly a revolutionary figure, she nevertheless provided her readers with alternative models for womanly success, suggesting that self-assertion and romantic fulfilment were not incompatible for twentieth-century women. It was a message that found an eager audience.

If you are interested, the book is available on the Gutenberg Project website. Just for the very freaks (this half of BrontëBlog included): do you know that Nelson Eddy & Jeanette McDonald planned to make a comeback in 1948 with an adaptation of this novel ? Check this link if you don't believe it or take a close look to the cover (on the right) of The Rosary's most recent edition.

Categories: Books, In_the_News, Juvenilia, Jane_Eyre