Castration, pilgrimages and comparisons

For those who think Jane eyre is a women-only kind of book - which it definitely is NOT - we bring you one more example of a man who does not think so: Howard Jacobson. Unfortunately, the article is open only to subscribers, so we have nothing but the very promising beginning.

Why I'm not complaining, even if 'Jane Eyre' is the greatest castration story ever told
Reader, she married him. Burned him, blinded him, maimed him, mutilated him, scarred him, marred him, mortified him, married him. Now tell me it's a mystery that Jane Eyre is every woman's favourite novel.
Mine, too. Or at least one of them. Not quite up there with Anna Karenina, but occupying an honourable place in that list of 19th-century novels of female obduracy and principle that includes Mansfield Park and Middlemarch and Little Dorrit. For half my life that was what I believed the novel was - the story of an intelligent, quiet, sometimes plain but always resolute woman's struggle to get the world to notice, accept, and finally love her. I don't know how old I was before I realised that a novel could also be about a man, but I recall the shock. And, in a small corner of my heroine-addicted soul, I am still not entirely convinced that novels should have men in them at all. A sentiment, of course, which many contemporary women readers share.

We must say, though, we will never get the castration thing, but to each their own, I guess.

We have also seen many men making the pilgrimage to haworth and other Brontë-related places. However, it is a woman, Catherine Watson, who writes an article on her visit to Haworth.

I admit it: I'm hooked on visiting house museums, especially ones that belonged to authors I idolize. This penchant for tracing famous writers to their lairs started early -- at birth, if not before.
I blame my mother. She named me after Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of "Wuthering Heights," her favorite book.
It was inevitable that someday I'd go looking for the author. When I did, my mother went along. We traveled to the north of England, to the humble parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire, where Emily Bronte and her writer-sisters Charlotte ("Jane Eyre") and Anne ("The Tenant of Wildfell Hall") spent nearly all of their short lives.
The day we were there was cold and cloudy. Black rooks were cawing above the tilted headstones in the graveyard in front of the house, and rough, dark waves of moorland crowded close in back. All it took was one look out the parsonage windows to understand the Bronte sisters' longing for passion and drama in their lives.
Imagination gave them what life in their small, cramped dwelling could not. And that, in a nutshell, is the appeal of a cultural pilgrimage - the jolt of insight you can get from a place that was important to someone who was important to you.
You'd think that heroic deeds would be all we'd need from our heroes. But cultural pilgrims want more: We want to get close to them -- closer than their writing or painting or music or politics can bring us.
We want to see who they were when they weren't being famous, when they were off duty, when they were being ordinary. Nothing I know does it as well as visiting the places they called home.

I still recall people giving me weird looks and even openly laughing when I said excitedly that I was going to Haworth and seeing an exhibition on Charlotte's wedding. So it's not everyone who will get that last sentence.

My Bronte pilgrimage wasn't very complicated. The Brontes, after all, stayed home. Literary pilgrimages get a lot more demanding when you're worshipping a hero who traveled. The more rootless the hero, the more difficult the quest.

Well, they studied and worked elsewhere too. Anne Brontë is buried in Scarborough. Charlotte and Emily spent months in Brussels. There's plenty of travelling to be done if you really want to follow in their footsteps.

Still in Haworth, however, we read on a blog about a book on William Grimshaw. A Haworth incumbent years before Patrick Brontë settled there but which left a very deep mark and became a well-known figure in the Church. A teapot of his stayed on at the Parsonage after his death and it is said to have been a favourite of Aunt Branwell's. It can still be seen at the Parsonage today.

I've been reading about a man called William Grimshaw! He was the Vicar of Haworth, West Yorkshire sometime during the 1730's. Haworth is famous for the Bronte Sisters - their dad was the Vicar about 70 years after Grimshaw. Anyway, Grimshaw was a nutter. His church grew from 12 to 1200 in about 5 years. Impressive eh? Orginially from Lancashire, he moved to Yorkshire in his early 30's. Prior to his move, his wife sadly died leaving him with two small children. This is when i happened. In his brokeness and despair he met Jesus in a new and profound way. The Wesleys, Whitefield and that crew described him as a man on fire. I love this story. It's not a story about church growth per se. He didn't buy new carpets, he didn't follow a 15 point plan to revival... just a northern man, broken and desperate to see God do something.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is still being well publicised. We doubt many books get as many reviews as this one does!

The Emporia Gazette says:

Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman’s story. And what a story it is, replete with madness; incest; a pair of twins who speak a private language; a devastating fire; a ghost that opens doors and closes books; a baby abandoned on a doorstep in the rain; a page torn from a turn-of-the-century edition of “Jane Eyre”; a cake-baking gentle giant; skeletons; topiaries; blind housekeepers; and suicide. [...]
Setterfield’s work invokes both “Jane Eyre” and “Rebecca,” but the mystery is very much her own. Contending with ghosts and with a scary bunch of living people, Setterfield’s sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling — and is not ready for heartache and romance. And like Jane, she’s a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That’s where the comparisons end.

And The Calgary Sun:

Critics have invoked Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and the works of Wilkie Collins in describing the style of the dark and disturbing story that unfolds about writer Vida Winter's dysfunctional family. [...]
With its ghosts and its secrets -- and its devastating fire -- The Thirteenth Tale has overtones of Jane Eyre and Rebecca; Margaret echoes the second Mrs. de Winter in her innocence and slow journey toward knowledge.

And finally, we will use this report of a Janeites' (or Janites as they are called in this article) convention to congratulate Mags from AustenBlog (which inspired BrontëBlog) on her upcoming Jane Austen handbook!

Stoner, who keeps multiple copies of Austen's books so she can loan them out to friends, puts it simpler: "I can't relate to Jane Eyre. But I can relate to the very talkative Miss Bates (of 'Emma'), who rambles on and on. We all know someone like that." [...]
Charlotte Brontë, author of "Jane Eyre," criticized Austen for being boring. It is Austen's grasp of the mundane, Ray says, that allows readers to so freely relate to her today.

Let's not forget, however, that Anne Brontë's prose and style have been compared to Jane Austen's in the past.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane_Eyre