"Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave"

Jane Eyre in two different contexts:

1. As a mistress (although she never was actually):

Mistresses
The History of the Other Woman
Elizabeth Abbott

* ISBN 9780715639467
* October 2010
* Duckworth Publishers

She has been known as the ‘kept woman’, the ‘fancy woman’ and the ‘other woman’. She is both a fictional character and flesh-and-blood human being. But who is she, really? What do Madame de Pompadour, Heloise, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Eyre and Camilla Parker-Bowles have in common? Why do women become mistresses, and what is it like to have a private life that is usually also a secret life? Is a mistress merely a wife-in-waiting, or is she the very definition of the modern emancipated, independent female?
In Mistresses Elizabeth Abbott intelligently probes the motives and morals of some of history’s most infamous and fascinating women. Drawing intimate portraits of those who have – either by chance, coercion or choice – assumed this complex role, from Chinese concubines and European royal mistresses to mobster molls and trophy dolls, Mistresses offers a rich blend of history, personality and cultural study.

Jane Eyre appears in Chapter XII: Fallen Women, in the company of Hester Prynne, Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina.

2. And as Charlotte Brontë's alter ego in Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre which is republished by Constable & Robinson:

Becoming Jane Eyre

Sheila Kohler
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: Constable & Robinson. Corsair (1 Jun 2010)(*)
# ISBN-10: 1849010862
# ISBN-13: 978-1849010863

The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.
So unfolds the story of the Brontë sisters. At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.

 (*) According to the publishers website the release date is August 4, 2011.

Categories: Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre