'I have erred in making horror too predominant'

The Guardian is in the process of apologising for and looking into its founders' links to slavery. An article looks into 'how Britain buried its history of slavery'. Jane Eyre's colonialism is hardly a new discovery but we still don't like to see the novel quoted so out of context.

Britain makes little to no sense without its racial history. It is there in our literature, from Rhoda Swartz, the “rich wolly-haired mulatto” heiress from St Kitts in Vanity Fair, to Bertha Mason, the “discoloured” creole wife of Edward Rochester, with her “blackened” face from Jamaica, who is hidden in the attic in Jane Eyre. It is there in the turn-of-the-century world’s fairs where colonial subjects were shipped to Europe as exhibits, complete with grass skirts and mud huts. (Gary Younge)

The words 'discoloured' and 'blackened' as applied to Bertha appear in chapter XXV when Jane is describing Bertha without knowing who she is or whether she's even real:

“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell.”

“Did you see her face?”

“Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass.”

“And how were they?”

“Fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!”

“Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.”

“This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?”

Interestingly, only a few chapters before, in chapter XXII, Mrs Reeds's face is also described as 'discoloured':

My journey seemed tedious—very tedious: fifty miles one day, a night spent at an inn; fifty miles the next day. During the first twelve hours I thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments; I saw her disfigured and discoloured face, and heard her strangely altered voice. 

Anyway, it seems like an appropriate moment to quote Charlotte Brontë herself and how she soon grew to regret her portrayal her of Bertha. From a letter to William Smith Williams written on January 4th, 1848:

It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant. Mrs Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane but sin itself is a kind of insanity; the truly good behold and compassionate it as such.

The New Statesman reviews Claire Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life.

We know little of how Eliot came to defy social convention and build a life with a man she could not legally marry – it was not a topic she could discuss in her letters. The first words of Carlisle’s biography are simply: “She had decided.” Still, Carlisle puts this leap in the context of Eliot’s reading life – from her reaction against the matrimonial moralising of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which argues that marriage should not need the formal recognition of the Church. In July 1854, Lewes and Eliot set off on their “honeymoon” to Germany – she would refer to herself to friends as “Mrs Lewes” hereafter. (Anna Leszkiewicz)

Culture Fly reviews Murder Under the Tuscan Sun by Rachel Rhys:

Despite this, Murder Under the Tuscan Sun reads very much like a cross between Mexican Gothic and Jane Eyre, a combination that I had no idea I wanted to read until I had this book in front of me. (Megan Davies)

The Scarborough News reports that a lorry crash has destroyed one of the walls of the churchyard at St Mary's church, where Anne Brontë is buried.

The large articulated low loader drove along Castle Road before turning into Church Lane and becoming stuck shortly after 2pm on March 20.

As the lorry attempted to reverse out of the narrow street it hit the burial ground wall of St Mary’s Church, which is Grade I listed, causing it to collapse. (George Buksmann)