The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë Wrote Her Masterpiece
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
The surprising hidden history behind Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Why did Charlotte Brontë go to such great lengths on the publication of her acclaimed, best-selling novel, Jane Eyre, to conceal its authorship from her family, close friends, and the press? In The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher tells the enthralling story of Brontë’s compulsion to write her masterpiece and why she then turned around and vehemently disavowed it.
Few people know how quickly Brontë composed Jane Eyre. Nor do many know that she wrote it during a devastating and anxious period in her life. Thwarted in her passionate, secret, and forbidden love for a married man, she found herself living in a home suddenly imperiled by the fact that her father, a minister, the sole support of the family, was on the brink of blindness. After his hasty operation, as she nursed him in an isolated apartment kept dark to help him heal his eyes, Brontë began writing Jane Eyre, an invigorating romance that, despite her own fears and sorrows, gives voice to a powerfully rebellious and ultimately optimistic woman’s spirit.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre expands our understanding of both Jane Eyre and the inner life of its notoriously private author. Pfordresher connects the people Brontë knew and the events she lived to the characters and story in the novel, and he explores how her fecund imagination used her inner life to shape one of the world’s most popular novels.
By aligning his insights into Brontë’s life with the timeless characters, harrowing plot, and forbidden romance of Jane Eyre, Pfordresher reveals the remarkable parallels between one of literature’s most beloved heroines and her passionate creator, and arrives at a new understanding of Brontë’s brilliant, immersive genius.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pfordresher (Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination), an English professor at Georgetown University, suggests that Charlotte Bront 's beloved novel Jane Eyre draws its deep emotional power from the way she refashioned her own losses and frustrations into her heroine's triumph. This book is a narrative of that transformation, essentially a biography of Bront as told through the events of her novel. Pfordresher makes his way with anecdotal ease through his subject's life, generously acknowledging his debt to previous biographies, letter collections, and Bront 's juvenilia. He doesn't quite resolve a paradox of Jane Eyre: Bront claimed she was not her heroine, but the novel was titled "an autobiography," and she insisted on its truth. The psychologizing, speculation, and parallel-hunting are interesting and occasionally haunting; for example, Pfordresher finds Bront 's dead sisters in the character of Jane's best friend, Helen Burns. But the biographical interpretation occasionally confuses the writer with her creation and ultimately limits the novel to a wishful righting of Bront 's childhood torments, unhappy work as a governess, and painful, unrequited passion for Constantin Heger. Fans of the novel will enjoy this behind-the-scenes investigation into Jane Eyre and the imagination of its author, but the parallels it produces aren't enough on their own to explain the enduring fascination of Bront 's work.
