Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË,
JANE EYRE
All too often, the lives of authors we love read like a litany of disappointment, grief, and misery. Charlotte Brontë's story is no exception. For the first thirty-two years of her life she was beaten down by circumstance and devastated by failure after failure. She clung to her family, only to see her two elder sisters die of malnutrition and tuberculosis. She attended school and went out into the world, struggling and failing at the only jobs available to her—governess and teacher—so she returned home, and watched her family fall apart before her eyes. And she wrote, only to see her work skewered as coarse, immoral, and unwomanly.
The story of how this plain, poor writer created one of the greatest literary triumphs in the English language is as much about steadfastness as it is about grief. Charlotte’s journey from impotence to immortality started in the damp parsonage at Haworth in harsh northern England, where she lived in the company of her eccentric, literary siblings and a distracted father. The wild, unfettered moors were the perfect place for the awkward Brontës, who spent more time wandering through nature and stomping through their tiny living room than associating with their father’s congregation. Isolated, soggy, and freezing cold, the house overlooked a graveyard where, in time, nearly everyone who had ever been close to Charlotte would lie buried.
The motherless Brontë girls enjoyed an unusual degree of education at the hands of their gruff curate father, Patrick, who had taken over their upbringing after Maria Brontë's long, slow death from uterine cancer in 1821. Still, as they grew up, the sisters bumped up against the twin barriers of cultural convention and social standing. Poor and lacking in looks and connections, Charlotte was forced to make her way in a world that didn’t think much of feminine ability. The results were less than encouraging. Her forays into the world of governessing and teaching flopped. Every time she forged a path away from Haworth, desperate to make a living, she was forced back home when the money ran out and the well of her employers’ goodwill ran dry. Deprived of outside stimulus, Charlotte was continually thwarted by disease, lack of funds, and family emergencies. Though she clung to her sisters in the years that followed, she began to turn inward for solace.
When faced with the vagaries of a world they never cared much to understand, the Brontës wrote. Together with her brother, Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte was obsessed with violent struggles in imaginary kingdoms throughout her childhood and adolescence. Huddled around the fire of the parsonage, the siblings wrote epic poems and long sagas. But it was the first real personal crisis of her life that prompted Charlotte to write for herself, by herself.
In retrospect, it’s amazing that Charlotte had a chance for any kind of failed love at all, obscured as she was by the isolation of Haworth and the lowliness of her own social standing. Still, she managed to fall in love during her year at a boarding school in Brussels… and to be deeply wounded when her passion for a married man was first ignored, then roundly rejected. The trip to Brussels was an experiment intended to arm Charlotte with the tools she’d need to open her own school for girls in England. But the expedition took an unexpected turn when she met Constantin Heger, the school’s headmaster. Sarcastic, dark, and gruff, Constantin challenged Charlotte’s brain as much as her willpower. That challenge lingered as she found herself at home again, depressed and lethargic, gripped with an emotion she hardly dared name.
She tried to distract herself with words, the panacea of her childhood and the only things to which she could entrust her adulterous emotions. At first she could not write at all. Even letters to Heger, whom she begged to contact her, came slowly. “I should not know this lethargy if I could write,” she complained. “Otherwise, do you know what I should do, Monsieur? I should write a book, and I should dedicate it to my literature master—to the only master I ever had—to you, Monsieur…. But that cannot be. It is not to be thought of. The career of letters is closed to me—only that of teaching is open.”
Depressed and listless, maddened by Heger’s nonre-sponse, Charlotte kept turning to her pen. Her struggles slowly unraveled themselves on paper, culminating in a love letter that bleeds with unrequited passion and stifled agony. “I strove to restrain my tears, to utter no complaint,” she wrote. “But when one does not complain, when one seeks to dominate oneself with a tyrant’s grip, the faculties start into rebellion and one pays for external calm with an internal struggle that is almost unbearable. Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you…. Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them… nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love…. But you showed me of yore a little interest… and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold on to it as I would hold on to life.”
He never responded. The letter was later found, torn in pieces and meticulously pieced back together by Heger’s wife.
And this is where Charlotte’s steadfastness came in. Behind her lay what might have been her only chance at love. In front of her was a future full of bad weather and boredom. Deprived of her beloved professor and doomed to menial chores back at the parsonage, she began to write in earnest.
She wrote about love and deprivation. She wrote poems that blister with isolation and despair. She wrote her first novel. She even wrote one last letter to Heger. She wrote in the living room where she had spun fantastical tales as a child, surrounded by her sisters, who were avid readers and writers. Together, they shivered, worked, and read through the long, dark English winters, taking breaks to pace around the living room. Still, she kept her words to herself.
The orgy of writing that followed was no idyll. The family curse raised its head again as Branwell, once talented and precocious, slid further into the grips of laudanum addiction and alcoholism, humiliating the family with his repeated lapses into debt and his ranting, incoherent behavior. Meanwhile, Emily and Anne were placid and distracted, wrapped up in their own affairs.
Charlotte’s jump from literary secrecy to outright ambition was a happy accident. Sometime in late 1845, she picked up one of Emily’s notebooks. Idly, she began to read, forgetting that she had not asked permission to do so. What she saw electrified her. “Something more than surprise seized me,” she recalled later. “These were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write.” Forced to confess her perfidy to her sisters, she found herself launching into a heartfelt argument for publication.
It took a while to convince Emily and Anne that publication was desirable or even possible, much less to overcome their scruples over Charlotte’s betrayal of Emily’s A. Anyone else would have given up. But Charlotte knew her sisters, and was convinced that the genius they could demonstrate in words should not lie in state at the parsonage forever. Slowly, she cracked through their reserve, tantalizing them—and herself—with visions of access to a world they could never conquer alone.
Armed with a small legacy from their deceased aunt and uncharacteristically optimistic about their prospects, the trio paid to publish their poems under a set of ambiguous pseudonyms. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell appeared in May 1846. Encouraged by two positive reviews, the sisters hastened to mail off their first novels to their publisher. But their optimism was premature; despite early signs of promise, the book of poetry sold a grand total of two copies. Still, Charlotte didn’t give up.
The year that finally brought Charlotte into literary triumph and scandal would ultimately be overshadowed by a landscape of total personal devastation. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, but Charlotte could barely devote any time to its growing popularity, the public’s obsession with its author’s secret identity, and the scathing assessments of its “unchristian” subject matter. As her book took on a life of its own, Charlotte’s own life was unraveling. Branwell drank himself to death in 1848. Her eccentric sisters followed soon after, succumbing to tuberculosis within three months of one another. Charlotte and her father were all alone.
Charlotte shielded herself from her pain with the thing that had always gotten her through: writing. “If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” she wrote in the preface to her novel Shirley in 1849. “Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.” Though she steadfastly turned herself to the duties that lay ahead, the years that followed her losses were the loneliest and most uncertain she had ever faced. Was this the end of life?
Charlotte’s alter ego asks herself the same question in the darkest chapters of Jane Eyre, a book that has much to teach us about loyalty and steadfastness. The abandonment, hopelessness, and devastation of Charlotte’s personal life pales in comparison with the trials she gave Jane, an impoverished orphan who must make her way through a hostile and immoral world. Just when Jane thinks she has found true love and a peaceful existence, Charlotte snatches the rug from under her feet. Edward Rochester, the moody man Jane loves with her entire life, reveals a disastrous secret at the altar: he is already married. Even worse, his wife is a madwoman who lives in the attic of the house where the now hopelessly star-crossed couple fell in love.
Here’s where it gets good. Anyone who has cracked open Jane Eyre is not likely to soon forget the emotional ordeal that follows as Jane faces the love of her life and refuses his request to be her lover, if not her husband.
I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty—“Depart!”
“Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise—'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.’”
“Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours.”
Lashed by the whip of principle, Jane flees across the moors, ending up exhausted, starving, and entirely debased as she starts a new life of voluntary separation from the only person she has ever loved. Jane is clearly poised for a comeback, but first she must undergo some of the most harrowing chapters in English literature. Charlotte almost revels in Jane’s devastation, but she won’t let her wallow for long. Slowly, she builds Jane back up, first through blind hope, then through abstract faith, and finally through the deeds and the love of other people.
A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.
What possible redeeming value can there be in this ultimate of darkest hours before dawn? Fortunately for Jane, and for us, Charlotte has buried a kernel of hope in the storm, and within her heroine. Jane’s rebirth is not one of brute persistence or of bravery, though she persists and is brave. It is of internal steadfastness, a dogged adherence to personal principles and values even when she is literally floored by grief and fear.
In the chapters that follow Jane’s flight, Charlotte and Jane get down to the nitty-gritty of what can sustain a person through a personal crisis of epic proportions. Jane the person is stripped down piece by piece, voluntarily turning her back on her relationships, her past associations, and even her name (she goes by a pseudonym in order to escape search and rescue by Rochester). Faced with the crisis of a relationship gone horribly wrong, one that threatens both her place in society and in the eyes of God, Jane refuses to take the easy way out. Instead, she chooses certain misery, shedding that which does not serve her principles. “Life, however,” she reflects, “was yet in my possession; with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.”
At first, it seems like there won’t be much left to set out toward. Jane has consciously dumped the trappings of the beautiful bride and is left only with her plain garb and meager possessions. Jane the social construct—the governess, the unlikely bride, the future Mrs. Rochester—is meaningless out on the moors. All that’s left is Jane as she truly is—a lost soul.
Jane’s journey through terror, abandonment, and conflicted emotions takes on a nightmarish quality for a while. Her lament echoed by the wild landscape she encounters, she does not stop. Though she has little to be thankful for, she gives thanks. And she keeps walking.
Does Jane’s strength come from her utter rootlessness, from the lessons of a life of hardship, toil, and emotional deprivation? Perhaps. But Jane is as human as her creator. As she wanders along in a crisis partly of her own making, strength and weakness seem interchangeable. Faced with a difficulty (and what a difficulty!), Jane has chosen loyalty to herself over loyalty to her love. The hardships of her life have not been enough to soften her. If she stays with Rochester, she will doubtless enjoy the rest of her life… and burn in hell for all eternity. So she goes, suffering as much from her self-imposed isolation as from the knowledge that she has wounded the one she holds most dear.
Principles got Jane into this mess, and eventually they get her back out again. Jane’s steadfastness endangers her one meager chance at happiness and sets her life on a course of survival and focus. But the act of clinging, the very practice of steadfastness, defines and hones the principles themselves.
Jane’s deluge takes away everything she has come to value, but it has something to give in return. That journey is the crucible in which her true character—that of a woman who combines principle with a loving heart, a woman who can’t bear mere duty and learns to temper her natural severity with love—is forged. And, tellingly, it is a journey Jane must make alone. All the brooding lovers and abusive teachers in England couldn’t teach Jane as much about herself or her core values as a few days wandering the moors, looking for salvation, and searching for the next right step. Though she would be content to fall into the moors and become a part of the outdoors, she does not die. She stands up, moves forward, asks for help. Ultimately, Jane makes her way back to Rochester and finds her happy ending. Steadfastness rewarded, she survives.
Charlotte, too, clung steadfastly to life over death. After a period of intense grief, she entered the world of English literary lights on her own terms, ventured out from Haworth and brushed shoulders with London high society. She even married, leaving behind the spinsterhood that defined and confined much of her adult life. Though fated to die young (she succumbed to dehydration in 1855 following a bout of uncontrollable morning sickness after only a few months of marriage), Charlotte had one thing in common with her plain Jane: she couldn’t be beaten by life.
Any heroine worth reading about will one day find herself on the moors of a devastating personal crisis. For the most part, we must traverse them alone. We would do well to remember Charlotte and Jane as we come face to face with our inadequacy and our inner strength.
The moment of crossing is one of isolation, humility, and despair. But as heroines, we are already equipped with everything we need. Inside every heroine is the lovelorn, lonely writer who kept on working; the plain governess who kept on walking toward her principles. Even when we’re too scared to function or too grief-stricken to care, we can be carried along by steadfast actions like Jane’s. Our steadfastness punctures the fear and isolation of the deluge, enabling us to address only that which deserves our attention and keep putting one foot in front of the other, bad reviews and broken hearts notwithstanding.
I first encountered Jane Eyre when I was far too young to understand the sweep of its great love story and its great tale of cleaving to one’s self as steadfastly as to any other love. I loved it then for what it gave me, but I love it more now for what I bring to every reading. It’s a book I revisit again and again: when I seek to see myself amid the threat of depression and feeble people-pleasing, when I need to bolster myself for storms of my own making. Every time, it’s a bit different, some parts familiar and soothing, others jarring and rude. But every time I finish Jane Eyre, I marvel at how plain and poor Jane can adhere so unbreakably to her own truth. This steadfastness pushes her into heroic territory, even when it seems as if she will come out with nothing but her principles. It’s the thing that carries her through one of literature’s more turbulent love stories without separating her from herself or her ideals.
Like Jane, we are goaded by peril and stress, loss and unimaginable redefinition. First, we lose sight of ourselves. Then we hone in, regroup. Suddenly, clarity sets in: unimportant things are shelved until later; our selves are identified, then cared for. Slowly, painfully, we become even more loyal to that which we know to be right. We stand up. We ask for help, even when doing so seems “as unromantic as Monday morning.” We walk on toward ourselves. And we make our way forward, as long as we don’t cling too tightly to the principles that drive us onward. Like Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë, we find we “must struggle on, strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.”
READ THIS BOOK:
• In the midst of breakups and life passages
• With a box of tissues at hand
• When you’re not sure if you can deal with another personal bombshell
JANE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
• Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
• Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë