"Reader, I married him."
It's one of the most iconic lines in all of English literature.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's poor, orphaned, neglected heroine, has
finally married the man she loves, Rochester, and on her own terms.
As a teenager, and a debut novelist myself at 16,
I was intrigued by Jane Eyre.
Like many millions of readers before me, I immersed myself in her
world of loss and suffering, striving and redemption.
Charlotte Bronte's heroine got everything she wanted,
and without compromising her principles.
Or did she?
Revisiting Bronte's classic novel now,
my reaction couldn't be more different.
I find the book so much more disturbing
and darker than my teenage memory of it.
'In this film, I want to go back to Charlotte Bronte's original
'manuscript, examine early writing...'
Oh, my God!
'..and uncover personal correspondence which reveals
'experiences that shape the book's narrative.'
You can almost tell that the hand is clenched.
'And I want to test out my ideas about the book
'and its central character with experts.'
Actually, Jane Eyre is revolutionary in her demands.
Oh! I don't agree at all.
Well, I think you're right that Jane Eyre isn't just a love story.
It's full of violence, frustration and repressed desire.
As a protagonist, Jane Eyre is one of the great literary characters,
but I want to know, how much of a heroine is she?
"I am glad you are no relation of mine.
"I will never call you aunt again so long as I live.
"I will never come to see you when I'm grown up, and if anyone asks me
"how I liked you and how you treated me, I will say the very thought
"of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.
"How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?
"How dare I, Mrs Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth."
I love that.
Jane Eyre was only ten years old when she finally snapped
and confronted Mrs Reed,
the cruel aunt who turned a blind eye to Jane's bullying cousins.
When I first read the novel, I loved this orphan girl who was angry,
outspoken, and acutely aware of injustice.
I admired her emotional independence
and her total determination to make her own way in the world, even
when she was sent away to a brutal boarding school.
At 18, Jane Eyre becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall.
It's where the central love story of the novel begins -
Jane's relationship with the master of the house.
Her employer is the mercurial and tormented Edward Rochester.
Charlotte Bronte describes "his stern features,
"his heavy brow, his considerable breadth of chest."
This was my first copy of Jane Eyre from when I was a teenager,
and to prove it to you... there you go,
October 1996 with a vintage doodle from my teen years.
And this is my teenage bedroom, where I read Jane Eyre
for the first time, on that bed.
And not only that but, looking through it now, I see that
I clearly went through it highlighting all of the dirty bits!
"You examine me, Miss Eyre, said he, Do you think me handsome?"
But she goes, "No, sir."
She refuses to compromise or demean herself even though it's
quite obvious that she's attracted to him too.
As a young reader, I was rooting for her all the way.
I got just as wrapped up
in the love story element of the novel as she did.
When Charlotte Bronte wrote her great love story
between Jane Eyre and Rochester, she wanted her writing to be judged
on merit, and not with any reference to her gender,
not least because she was writing frankly about female desire.
'Bronte was 30 years old when Jane Eyre was published in 1847,
'under the guise of an autobiography edited by Currer Bell -
'a pseudonym adopted by Charlotte Bronte.
'The book was an overnight sensation.
'Today, the British Library has the only surviving manuscript.'
I can't believe that we're sitting in front of an original
manuscript of Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte herself.
The handwriting is so precise, the whole thing seems immaculate
and neat, as though this is all very thought through.
She would hesitate to choose the right word, or the right
expression, just to get it right.
I'm just astonished that these
pages do give off a kind of atmosphere, don't they?
Yeah, they do, definitely.
It's beautifully, beautifully neat,
and this is the fair copy of the manuscript.
We know that she would start out writing in pencil on lots
of little sheets and then she would work from those
and produce the fair copy, which is what the publishers were sent.
Bronte's manuscript shows how careful
and considered she was with the writing of her novel.
But intimate letters survive that reveal a far more emotionally
unrestrained side to the author.
One of the most significant periods in Charlotte Bronte's life
was in the early 1840s, when she travelled to Brussels to
study languages, and we know that she fell in love
with Monsieur Heger.
He was the married professor of literature who taught
Charlotte Bronte.
Heger was the first man outside her family who'd actually recognised
her genius and she responded to him in a very passionate way.
It's a really formative period in her life.
And before I cast my eyes upon this letter,
I just have to know, was it reciprocated?
No. No.
From the first paragraph, it says it's been six months
and she's going over the date of her last letter that she wrote him.
They came to an agreement that she would only write one letter
every six months, and when she kept that agreement,
and he still didn't respond, she would fire back with quite
an angry, passionate sort of pent up letter.
Yeah. You can almost tell that the hand is clenched,
the writing hand is absolutely clenched.
Well, I don't think I can puzzle out any more of the French,
because it's so tiny.
This is a translation of the letter.
"I will tell you candidly that during this time of waiting I've tried to
"forget you, and when one has suffered this kind of anxiety
"for one or two years" - years! - "one is ready to do anything
"to regain peace of mind."
This is her first sort of crush, really.
I think it's more than a crush.
"When a dreary and prolonged silence seems to warn me
"that my master is becoming estranged from me,
"I lose my appetite and my sleep - I pine away."
The thing that strikes me immediately is that she refers
to him as "my master", which is exactly what Jane Eyre... Yes.
..does to Edward Rochester. She calls him "my master" throughout.
Heger played a huge part in the shaping of Rochester's character,
and the relationship between Jane.
But does he torment her deliberately in a way that...
I think he did.
Yeah, he was aware of his power over his pupils,
and particularly over Charlotte Bronte.
How long did it take her to write Jane Eyre?
It took her... From starting it to actually sending the fair copy
to the publishers, it was 12 months.
And it was not long after the Brussels period.
We know the Thornfield section of the novel
was completed in three weeks.
So it seems like she was very confident.
And that this was coming from very deep inside?
Coming from very deep inside her, yeah.
This passion for her teacher in Brussels clearly inspired
the writing of Jane Eyre.
But for Bronte's fictional love story,
she would choose a much grander setting suited to the melodramatic
reworking of her own emotional experiences.
Bronte's novel is famously set against the epic backdrop
of the Yorkshire moors.
And this fortified manor house has been used as a film location
for many dramatised versions of the book.
In my imagination, and that of countless readers and film goers,
this could be Edward Rochester's ancestral home, Thornfield Hall.
It's the perfect stage for Charlotte Bronte's Gothic story
of fairytale, horror and magical revelation.
Part of the power of the book lies in the way Bronte combines
these disparate genre styles with realistic storytelling.
Re-reading the book now, the darkness seems much more
oppressive, widespread and disturbing.
Far from the heady romance I read as a teen, I now see the relationship
between Rochester and Jane Eyre as an extremely abusive one,
especially in the way he exploits his position of authority over her.
Throughout the novel, Rochester refers to Jane as "little".
And she submissively calls him "master".
Ultimately, she's presented as accepting of his aggression
and of her own dependence and emotional subordination.
Bronte writes,
"His presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire.
"Yet I had not forgotten his faults - indeed,
"I could not, for he brought them frequently before me."
And there's nothing romantic about Rochester's marriage proposal
to her. He says, "Jane, will you marry me?
"You - poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are - I entreat
"you to accept me as a husband".
These are words that the self-effacing Jane has used
to describe herself to Rochester before.
And she replies to him, "Are you in earnest?
"Do you truly love me?
"Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife?"
But then all her dreams come crashing down -
Rochester's already married.
He's been lying to her throughout and he's hidden his mad wife,
Bertha, in the attic.
Jane faces a stark choice - stay with Rochester
and be his mistress or follow her convictions and her dignity,
even if it means letting go of the man she loves.
Jane flees Thornfield - she's by herself and she has nothing.
Jane says, "I may be poor and plain and alone, but I care for myself."
She's aware that if she becomes Rochester's mistress,
she loses not only her respectability but her self-respect.
'This is where I wished Jane had stayed strong
'and seen the last of Rochester.
'Although an unexpected inheritance brings her financial independence,
'she chooses to return to him a year later.
'But the novel is not so kind to her former master.
'As his home is engulfed in flames,
'he's crippled and robbed of his sight.
'It's as though Bronte has given him his karmic punishment.'
Rochester's blind and he's been maimed trying to save
Bertha from the devastating fire she caused at Thornfield.
Bertha dies, leaving Rochester free to finally marry Jane.
'With fairytale neatness, it's all very convenient.
'Not only is Bertha out of the way forever,
'but Jane's fortunes have risen while Rochester's have fallen.'
Many readers see an equality between Jane
and Rochester by the end of the novel.
But I'm afraid I don't accept that at all.
She revels in serving this man and I think she exults at Bertha's demise.
'I want to take Charlotte Bronte and her creation, Jane Eyre,
'to task, and find out more about the heroine who has resonated
'with so many readers, but has left me with so many doubts.
'I've come to the lifelong home of the Brontes,
'in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
'It's where Charlotte lived with her literary sisters, Anne and Emily,
'and where she completed Jane Eyre - her most successful novel.'
One of the things I've always loved about Jane Eyre is her anger
and she will answer back to anyone who mistreats her, and I feel almost
that when she gets to Thornfield, she becomes curiously submissive.
I am disturbed by the... I see you wincing in pain there!
..as soon as she gets to Thornfield, because in sweeps Mr Rochester,
and from then on I feel like she is sort of magnetised by him,
and he begins to torment, tease, flirt with her,
and I'm reading it thinking, where is that child that stood by herself?
Well, I think first of all, this is an education novel.
You know, it's a bildungsroman and so it is about a character
changing and maturing, and I think that the whole thing is that
she's not just going to give into her anger.
When it comes to Mr Rochester, it's not just a love story,
it's really about her asserting herself
and refusing to submit to someone else's will.
I mean, he might call her his little bird,
but she resists him all the time.
Oh, I don't agree at all.
Jane strikes me as this completely damaged, broken individual
and I think that's what happens when you've grown up
and nobody has shown you even a shred of love... Yes, yes.
..and it's this that leads her into this very sadomasochistic
relationship with Rochester.
One of the first things she likes when she meets Rochester
is he falls from the horse and she helps him up and she says,
"I felt glad... I wasn't... My existence had become less passive,
"I was doing something to help him."
And that was her big gripe about 19th century lives for women.
But you see, but, but that, to me, is the ultimate in female masochism,
which is, "I love him because he needs me."
That's - you've just said it right there.
And at no point does Jane really judge Rochester.
But she also says, "I won't be a slave in your harem,
"I will be stirring up the slaves to liberty."
I mean, this is a theme about her character
striving for a kind of mental equality with a man.
And it was so unusual that after about a year of people saying,
"Isn't this a fantastic novel?" people starting saying, hmm,
this is the sort of same kind of mind-set which created
the 1848 revolution, Chartism, this sort of overturning of barriers.
This is what creates revolution all over the world.
And, yes, actually, Jane Eyre is revolutionary in her demands,
and I think she maintains that despite being very,
very attracted to Mr Rochester.
This is a mould breaking heroine.
'So, maybe I'm not giving Charlotte Bronte enough
'credit for challenging convention
'and pushing for female identity and passion to be taken seriously.
'And there was a radicalism too in the style of the book.
'The intimate first person
'autobiographical voice was itself pioneering.
'Its interior perspective would inspire later
'generations of novelists.
'But one aspect of Bronte's writing which still raises many
'questions for me is her attitude to race.
'As a child, she grew up during a time when slavery
'in the British Empire was nearing its end.
'I'm keen to know how the debate that raged around the trade
'might have informed her literary imagination.
'The British Library has some rare examples of Bronte's early
'writing, which show how she first imagined life in the colonies.'
So, this is the manuscript of The Foundling.
It's one of Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia.
But, but you're being so careful with it,
makes me think it's incredibly fragile. It is.
This is absolutely amazing.
This tells me that Charlotte Bronte was really ambitious,
to be published out in the world with a proper book. Yes, certainly.
And you can tell that by the sheer exuberance of her signature.
I mean, that's the biggest thing on this first page.
Verdopolis.
That was the name of this African colonial state where
many of the stories were set.
So it's incredibly politically charged.
Yeah, I mean, I think the way she presents a colony is very much
in line with the way she would have read about the colonies.
I'll just turn the page,
because I think you get a better sense then of it.
Oh, my God! Are those real...
That really is really tiny writing.
..letters. It's so small, it's sort of like ants marching
across the page. And yet each letter is perfect. Yes. Oh, yes!
I find it completely fascinating that this teenager, really,
is writing at a time
when in the outer world there is a huge amount of social change
happening around the abolition of slavery and this seems to
have filtered through to the young Charlotte Bronte in this story.
Yeah, I think what you will see here, if we just turn the page,
is that you have a description of this, of Verdopolis, of this...
This colonial state.
..this colonial city, which she describes here as
"that splendid city with such graceful haughtiness."
So, she's really taking on the role of the coloniser?
Yes, I think she definitely portrays this world
probably in a way that she would have read about it
in the Victorian period in which she grew up.
Do you think there's much of a social conscious in this?
I'm feeling that she's rather on the side of the colonials
who were going over to civilise the heathens.
In The Foundling, in particular,
there isn't a huge amount from the perspective of the native residents
of Verdopolis, but I think she certainly has an awareness of them.
So, there's that kind of involvement with colonial life.
But I don't think it's always clear exactly what her view is.
While a clear view on colonialism
and race may be absent from the writing of the young Bronte,
in my mind, the view revealed by the adult Bronte is much clearer.
When I re-read Jane Eyre, one of the most marked differences
was in my reaction to the treatment of Bertha,
Rochester's infamous mad wife in the attic.
As a young reader, I didn't see her as anything other than
an obstacle to the happy conclusion of Jane's love story.
The thought of Bertha locked up
didn't excite any sympathy in me or, frankly, in Jane herself.
Nor did I question that Rochester may have used Bertha for her money.
Bertha came from a wealthy family,
and Rochester met her in the West Indies.
Bertha is Creole, we're not sure if she's black or mixed race,
but she's described as dark skinned,
something which has negative connotations throughout the novel.
When Jane first lays eyes on her, her description is vivid
and extremely telling.
She says that Bertha is,
"Fearful and ghastly with a discoloured face, a savage face.
"The lips were swelled and dark.
"Black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes."
The way Bronte kills Bertha off couldn't be more violent.
She has her jumping to her death from the fire that she
herself caused at Thornfield.
Years before her demise at Thornfield,
it's likely that Bertha and Rochester's journey from Jamaica
would have ended here in Liverpool - a city
with a long and contentious history of trading with the colonies.
Something I realised when I was re-reading Jane Eyre is
I didn't read it as a love story this time.
To me, it was about race and foreignness,
particularly in the depiction of Bertha Mason,
the first wife who's been locked up in the attic.
Well, I think you're right that Jane Eyre isn't just a love story.
I mean, I think it is a love story,
but like, like all of Bronte's
novels, it's full of violence and frustration and repressed desire.
But it's true that the novel's attitudes to Bertha
I think are very ambivalent.
Do you think that the novel
is coming down on the side of colonialism?
Oh, yes, we know that Charlotte herself was a deeply
conservative woman, she was a Tory.
Her father was a Tory.
Her father was an Anglo-Irish Anglican parson who was
a Conservative.
So, I'm quite sure that in terms of her own politics, that would be
true, that she would not be critical of colonialism at all,
but novels are delicate and ambiguous and slippery things.
And what novelists themselves believe may not always be identical
with what they show and what they dramatise.
So, I think that, yeah, she would have, she would have,
she would have approved of colonialism,
but themes of subjugation - not least the subjugation of women -
themes of victimisation, exploitation,
are rife throughout the novel.
She does, of course, show the image of an exploited woman in Bertha.
Even if she doesn't see her that way, we can see her that way,
which gives us a very different view of the situation.
I'm very interested in the idea of Charlotte Bronte's conservatism
because, throughout the novel, she's going on about how
she demands equality, she wants to be seen as a person.
And yet, all her politics, all her ferocity, actually fail
when it comes to talking about international matters and slavery
and colonialism, even though she is acutely aware of women's suffering.
Well, I'm not sure one would, that it would be reasonable
to expect a 19th century governess like Jane, you know,
or even Charlotte, to be aware of that wider world.
But she sure is aware of the politics on her own doorstep.
Bertha does in a way represent a lot of guilt
and a lot of exploitation and a lot of frustration and desire which
are there in English society as a whole, and Bertha's the monstrous
incarnation of all this, which in one sense is repellent,
because that society doesn't want to acknowledge its roots
in colonial exploitation.
On the other hand, there's something about the exotic,
the dark the unknown, the adventurous...
As ever! Oh, these, well, these are classic notions...
..which of course is very effective. These are classic notions.
Absolutely. If you're saying that Bertha is a hideous stereotype,
for sure, I mean, no argument.
I don't think you're necessarily misreading Bertha.
I do think you're rather concentrating too much on her,
cos she's one element in a very complex novel,
and I don't think the novel can be reduced to its pretty odious
treatment of Bertha, yes, because there's something in that
kind of madness, in that kind of female madness in particular, which
calls very deeply to Charlotte, I think, and to, and to Jane.
'When I started out,
'I was really questioning how much of a heroine Jane Eyre is.'
I'm now not just beginning to mellow towards her,
I have to admit, I actively admire her.
Bronte gave voice to a female desire and sexuality
in a ground-breaking and influential literary form, conveying Jane Eyre's
experiences through a captivating and original, personal perspective.
I must admit, though, I am still horrified by the depiction
and treatment of the character of Bertha, but maybe that's me
judging Charlotte Bronte by my 21st-century politicised values.
'While I realise that Bronte was reflecting
'some of the prejudices of her time,
'the novel still allows for multiple nuanced readings, and at its heart
'is a radical plea for women to have greater equality with men.
'It's been so rewarding exploring this novel and its ambiguities,
'teasing out what it is that keeps pulling me back.
'And the answer is the same now as when I first read
'the book as a teenager - the complex character of Jane Eyre.
'The moral dilemmas of her world
'are so convincingly brought to life that her story continues
'to both inspire and provoke, nearly two centuries after it was written.'
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