Charlotte's footsteps in the parlour

The Guardian's Books Section publishes a special report devoted to writers' rooms. Lucasta Miller talks about Charlotte Brontë's one (Picture source):

This is the room in Haworth Parsonage, variously known as the dining room, the drawing room or the parlour, in which the Brontë sisters used to write and discuss their work with each other. When the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and future biographer, first visited in September 1853, she was struck by its exquisite cleanliness and neatness. In contrast to the "bleak cold colours" of the Yorkshire moors outside, "the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture".

Despite having published Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette pseudonymously, Charlotte had, by that time, become a - somewhat reluctant - literary celebrity. Gaskell noted the portrait of her over the fireplace, commissioned by her publisher from the fashionable artist George Richmond. The experience of sitting for it had been a trial for the self-conscious Charlotte, who had collapsed into mortified tears when asked by the artist to remove something odd from the top of her head (he thought it was possibly a bit off the inside of her hat, but it may have been, even more embarrassingly, an unsuccessful hairpiece). Richmond nevertheless captured the fire in Charlotte's eyes, even if he flattered and conventionalised the rest of her face, which Gaskell found plain, with missing teeth and irregular features.

Despite the welcoming warmth of the décor, the parlour retained an aura of melancholy. Charlotte's sisters Emily and Anne had died in 1848 and 1849 - Emily is said to have died on the sofa in this room - and the space seemed to resonate with a sense of loss. After Gaskell had retired for bed in the room directly above, she could hear Charlotte's footsteps in the parlour. The servant told her how the three sisters had been used to walking round the table as they talked late into the night: "Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died Miss Anne and Miss Brontë took it up - and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone."

The Telegraph publishes an article about the Blackwell's Espresso Book Machine and uses Jane Eyre as an example:

It would be unfair to characterise book lovers as Luddites. Only a couple of weeks ago, I sat down to lunch with one who immediately pulled out an exceptionally space-age gizmo and proceeded to show me how legible Jane Eyre was on its high-definition screen. (...)
Plus, within a couple of seconds in my hands, and one errant touch of the cursor, Jane Eyre had vanished, never to return. (Alex Clark)

The Times asks their readers about summer readings. We liked this contribution:

In the summer of 1990 I had just finished my GCSEs and was looking forward to a dissolute and lazy summer. My mother had other ideas: athree month break would be an ideal opportunity to start on the reading listfor my A-levels. So I spent that summer immersed in Wuthering Heights,reluctantly at first, but with increasing enthusiasm as this great tale ofpassionate love and revenge unfolded before me in my sheltered, middle-classback garden. I've re-read the book countless times since, and always those wildand windy moors bring back memories of that long, hot summer. (100 words) (Liz Gregory, Didsbury)

The Book Reporter reviews Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street:

From a literary point of view, Livesey manages to subtly integrate four different British literary figures --- from Keats and Charles Dodgson to Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens --- into the lives of her characters, at times drawing explicit parallels but more often trusting her readers to make the connections themselves (thereby delighting thousands of English majors worldwide). (Norah Piehl)

Fabula has a reminder of the Jane Eyre: text, context, urtext appeal to contributions that we published a few days ago:

For more than 160 years, Jane Eyre has been the object of all sorts of readings, critiques and sequels. When it appeared in 1847, the novel enjoyed incredible success: Jane Eyre, an Autobiography was widely read, but its plot and heroine were also accessible through the first critical interpretations or the numerous plays that were adapted from the novel as early as 1848. Known at first or second hand ever since its publication, Jane Eyre nowadays belongs to the category of books that one can discuss without having ever read them. Yet, to Brontë scholars and enthusiasts, appreciating the plot without having a taste of Charlotte Brontë's style seems impossible, claiming a clear understanding of the novel without resituating it in its context seems absurd, just as it feels pointless to try to appraise the talent of Charlotte Brontë's literary descendants without having been carried away by her own genius. This special issue of LISAe-journal, to be published in the first quarter of 2009, intends to reexamine Jane Eyre, its context, its text and its scope as an urtext, in order to exploit the full richness of the novel and to allow the readers to become immersed once more in this major text of nineteenth-century British literature.

Returning to sources, with such a novel as Jane Eyre, means first of all exploring what surrounded its creation. Victorian England, Yorkshire, Haworth or the parsonage may all be apprehended as fundamental to the novel, and examining their importance may lead to a better understanding of the thematic background of the text. Other elements in the genesis of the novel equally deserve our attention: the collective reading at the parsonage, allowing each sister to use the other two as touchstones to test the quality of her writing, Charlotte Brontë's involvement in the publication of the three sisters' works, or the energy she spent writing Jane Eyre in only a few months, while her first novel wound its way from publisher to publisher and kept being rejected. The context sheds a precious light on the novel and also functions as a background against which the originality and timelessness of Jane Eyre may be traced.

The text itself, because of its uniqueness and also the way it merges History with its story, has been the object of many readings, from feminist to Marxist, from psychoanalytical to structuralist, and so on. It is true that the novel is very fertile ground for critical discourse and offers an invitation to react, to comment or to decipher. The fields of investigation are as wide as the text itself, wider even, if one considers the importance of intertextuality (Bunyan, fairytales…) and of all the other art forms that punctuate the text (like painting or folklore), incessantly enabling it to transcend itself.

Reexamining Jane Eyre also means reading its sequels and rewritings, considering Charlotte Brontë's text as an urtext, an original text founding an artistic continuation. New connections may then be discovered between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The notion of quotation in works published afterwards may be of interest in a context of dissemination of Jane Eyre, as well as a study of adaptations for stage, screen or television, or of the illustrated versions of the novel that have been released so far.

Please send your proposals (20 to 50 lines), along with a short bio-bibliographical note, to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com) or Charlotte Borie (borie@univ-tlse2.fr) before 30 September 2008 (the deadline for completed articles is 30 November 2008). Please follow the norms for presentation indicated on the LISA e-journal website (http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/lisa/presentFr.php?p=1).

Responsable : Charlotte BORIE et Elise OUVRARD

Kwick! posts about a recent German translation of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Brontëana, Jane Eyre, References, Scholar, Wuthering Heights