Jane Eyre's lesson for lockdown

The Guardian turns to fictional characters for 'lessons for lockdown'.

An expansive imaginative life like Alice’s is rooted in the inner security that comes from being loved from birth, as another great fictional girl, Jane Eyre, confirms. At the point Jane Eyre begins, Jane has been stranded in the hostile confines of her Aunt Reed’s home. Charlotte Brontë takes pains to let us know that this hasn’t been her only emotional experience, that baby Jane’s arrival was received with joy by her birth parents before they succumbed to typhus, that she had been “a great favourite” of her adoptive Uncle Reed.

Jane’s subjection to the loveless regimes of Gateshead Hall and Lowood School has been preceded by the love of her earliest carers, implanting in her a belief in her right to life and selfhood and a fierce protectiveness towards her own imaginative freedom. In fact, she spends much of her young life yearning and fighting to regain the love she received in infancy.

After suffering public humiliation from the sadistic headmaster Brocklehurst, she tells her friend Helen Burns: “to gain some affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest – ”.

Jane is effectively saying that the worst imaginable pain is preferable to the void of lovelessness. She would rather be full of a pain she can feel than emptied of the basic conditions for feeling anything. Helen, who hushes her wild talk and counsels stoic endurance of her tormentors, eventually succumbs to the outbreak of typhus that Jane survives. Jane fights for the life Helen surrenders because, unlike Helen, she knows her life is worth fighting for, a knowledge that is the very meaning of resilience.

Jane carries in herself a kernel of parental love that grounds her determination and desire. (Josh Cohen)

Ara (in Catalan) announces a new imprint which aims to translate into Catalan books that have never been translated into the language before.

Doncs si no en tenien prou amb la setantena de títols a l’any que publiquen, s’han empescat una nova col·lecció, El Club Victòria, de novel·les angleses del XIX mai traduïdes o introbables en català, per tornar a posar en circulació una sèrie de títols que ens eixamplen el cor, segurament perquè els vam llegir quan érem joves, o perquè estan escrits en un estat de joventut que és el que voldríem sempre: Austen, Brontë, Gaskell, George Eliot, etcètera. Senyores que, a banda de prendre el te i menjar entrepans de cogombrets, van atrevir-se a sortir de la cotilla que imposava la reina Victòria i que ofegava els seus desitjos, aspiracions vitals i intel·lectuals només perquè havien nascut dones. No és estrany que, en plena quarta (o cinquena?) onada del feminisme es recuperin aquesta mena de títols, perquè contenen la llavor del que ha passat més tard. (Marina Espasa) (Translation)

Funny that Queen Victoria should impose anything on Jane Austen given that she was born nearly two years AFTER Jane Austen's death.

Sentieri Selvaggi (Italy) reviews Romola Garai's film Amulet.

Quella di Romola Garai è una storia alla Jane Eyre, dove al protagonista non viene proibito di salire in soffitta. (Carmelo Leonardi) (Translation)

GigWise interviews Ben Schneider from the band Lord Huron.

GW: Maybe it’s the echoing start, but I always get an image in my head of a ghostly scene, like something out of Wuthering Heights with two lost spirits…

BS: Yeah, it’s not explicit but a lot of Strange Trails deals with thinking about the memory of people in terms of ghosts. I’m not a huge supernatural guy, but I do appreciate the utility of those ideas about ghosts. It’s very engrained in us to come up with things like that to process how we feel, and I think ghosts are such a beautiful metaphor for the way the memory of someone can hang around and haunt you.

GW: In the version you did with Phoebe Bridgers, it felt like it changed the story into a conversation. Did it alter your perspective on the story of the song?

BS: I think it’s interesting to see both side, like you say, a Wuthering Heights type situation where there’s regret and remorse on both sides and both people are left with this feeling of being haunted.

You never fully move on from someone you’ve shared something so powerful with, for better or for worse, they haunt you for the rest of your life. That’s an impossible ghost to get rid of, there’s no spell, no incantation for that. (Lucy Harbron)

Eddie Izzard's 'Soundtrack Of My Life' on NME includes

The song that reminds me of home

Kate Bush – ‘Wuthering Heights’

“My home was sort of boarding school, and I can remember Tim Ashby walking in and saying: ‘You’ve got to fucking listen to this.’ And he was right because it’s just so unusual and captivating. The sound designer who worked with Kate on her [1978] tour – the one with the hands-free microphone – now works with me on my tour. He’s a really brilliant, inventive guy who does amazing things like making sure we have great outdoor sound at the Hollywood Bowl.” (Nick Levine)

A letter to the Times quotes Charlotte Brontë:

A friend of Charlotte Brontë once wrote to her saying: “You must tell me of my faults.” Who today would make such a request? And if it were complied with, it would be thought damaging — to the recipient’s self-esteem. (Madeline Macdonald)

Also in The Times a review of In Youth Is Pleasure 1945 by Denton Welch:

 On one of his solitary countryside adventures Orvil Pym spies on a scoutmaster, who is reading “pornographic” Jane Eyre aloud to his charges. Orvil notices that at the thrilling moment when Jane meets Rochester, one of the boys begins to masturbate: “It was a strange, unconscious, very excited moment.” (Paula Byrne)

Al Femminile (Italy) suggests literary quotes for tattoos, including one by Charlotte Brontë.