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Globalization and Female Voices

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The Women's Liberation Movement both rediscovered and encouraged new female writers. They also took over the means of production by setting up feminist printing houses such as Virago Press. Discover the authors, themes and techniques of 1970s feminism.

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V.Woolf and   K. Mansfield
The Inner Self

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From  Jane  Austen to the  Bronte  sisters

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From  Jane  Austen to the  Bronte  sisters

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A changing world and female writers

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SWING TIME

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Conversation and reading with Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith reads from her new work, Swing Time and is introduced by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Zadie Smith's new novel, Swing Time, is a dazzlingly energetic and deeply human story about friendship, music and stubborn roots. Her writing is "delightful, painful and spontaneously funny," wrote Ella Taylor.

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Search eText, Read Online, Study, Discuss.

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Searchable etext. Discuss with other readers.

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I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. "Do you think," she asks him, "because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!" The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on "the fateful third storey" of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her "goblin ha! ha!" ... What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon - like Dracula or Mr Hyde - that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without. Just like Jane herself, Bertha lives on in many forms - and gets her own story, of course, in another inspiring novel, Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, a brilliant bit of post-colonial revisionism Wide Sargasso Sea.

Sarah Waters

I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. "Do you think," she asks him, "because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!" The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on "the fateful third storey" of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her "goblin ha! ha!" ... What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon - like Dracula or Mr Hyde - that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without. Just like Jane herself, Bertha lives on in many forms - and gets her own story, of course, in another inspiring novel, Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, a brilliant bit of post-colonial revisionism Wide Sargasso Sea.

Tessa Hadley

Jane Eyre is so built into the shape of my imagination that I can hardly think about it critically; I'm always in among its trees - the sturdy, northern, low-growing hawthorn and hazel bushes of its terrain - and can't dispassionately estimate the size of the wood. The novel touches not one responsive note in me, but a whole sequence of them, each quite distinct. There's the little girl Jane, reading and dreaming in her window seat behind the drawn curtain, looking through the glass at the dreary November afternoon outside. There's Jane the governess at Thornfield, knowing she ought to be grateful because she is employed and fed and sheltered, yet still divinely discontented."Anybody may blame me who likes ... I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit." There's Jane after she has inherited her fortune, joyously and fervidly domestic, cleaning down Moor House from chamber to cellar, getting ready for Christmas. And then there's the dreamlike reconciliation with Rochester at the end of the novel, dark with the "small, penetrating rain" of overgrown Ferndean.

I do have my reservations; I've never been able to believe in Mr Rochester and his ponderous teasing courtship, no matter how hard I try. I don't think Charlotte Brontë had met enough worldly men - he sounds like an unworldly woman's idea of one. But the novel entrances me, literally - there are any number of passages that induce a submission in me that goes beyond critical appreciation: they have a dream-like power. Its symbolism, woven into the textures of its realism, transports me each time to the familiar ritual place, with its secret life that doesn't fail. The morning after Jane's coming together with Rochester in the orchard at Thornfield, "the great horse chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away".

Jeanette Winterson

We didn't have books at home except for the Bible and books about the Bible. But Mrs Winterson, my mother, must have been well read at one time because she decided to read Jane Eyre to me when I was seven. Jane Eyre was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it, St John Rivers, who is keen on missionary work. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and poor Mr Rochester goes blind, but Jane doesn't bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to the mission field. My mother read out loud, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Brontë. Only years later, reading it for myself, did I discover what she had done. It was an invaluable lesson for a writer; no story is the final one.

Margaret Drabble

I remember being gripped by two aspects when I first read Jane Eyre at the age of 10 or 11 - the horrible school at Lowood and the mad woman in the attic. The Lowood episode is the most frightening boarding school story ever written, and, of course, all children, me included, think they are friendless, persecuted and despised, and identify with the poor orphan. The meals of burned porridge were nearly as bad as the processed peas and gristle stew of Sheffield girls' high. I don't know why the fate of Bertha Mason simultaneously attracted and terrified me so much, but it did. I don't think it was for protofeminist reasons: it was more a fear of fire and madness, though its subliminal power was obvious even to a child. As an adolescent, I suppose I became more interested in the love affair, though by then I had read Wuthering Heights and much preferred Heathcliff to Rochester, and the fairytale wish-fulfilment elements in Jane Eyre I already found annoying and disturbing. On rereading in old age, I now find the arch, self-righteous and implausible dialogues between Jane and Rochester boring: they serve to remind one that is a much greater work. Maybe I prefer tragedy to romance. But I do now find the St John theme of temptation-to-virtue more resonant than I did, and Brontë's dreams of red room wombs and lost babies are very powerful. Also, I do now see more clearly why she shocked her contemporaries so much: Matthew Arnold was right when he said she was full of "hunger, rebellion and rage". Jane does not even attempt to hide her greed and need for love. It is painful to read of her longings, and even more painful to know they were never to be satisfied.

Esther Freud

I was 14 or 15 and living on the top floor of a communal house in a small village in Sussex when I first read Jane Eyre. It was the most romantic book I'd come across, and it ignited in me the idea - surely already smouldering - that there was someone out there who would see the grand heroine that was really me, and not the "small, plain" person I presented. I had a bedroom with a balcony that looked out over a large terraced garden, and I used to lean over it and see if I could catch sight of the current object of my affections, a married man who lived on the ground floor, with whom I was carrying on a romance of epic proportions, fuelled only by an occasional glance in my direction, the offer of a lift to the next village and, once, the soulful handing over of a flower. I found out later that he was in fact having an affair with the woman who rented two rooms on either side of the front door, and although in that instance - and, sadly, in many others - my intuition was out, it was Jane Eyre's psychic ability to know when she was being called to that has stayed with me most profoundly. When I next read the book, and recently, while listening to Rachel Joyce's luminous adaptation on the radio, I was struck by the extraordinary directness with which Rochester and Jane communicate. It thrills me, as it must have thrilled readers in 1847, how their talk transcends convention - cutting through politeness, forcing an intimacy that leaves them reeling, altered.

"Your smile did not strike my heart for nothing," Rochester tells Jane when she saves him from the fire, and then, noticing she is shivering with cold and shock, he tells her she must go. But she can't go. He still has hold of her hand. It is this yearning, this connection, this idea that there is something out there bigger than us, that makes so many readers - me among them - respond to Brontë's masterpiece so powerfully.

Andrew Motion

I knew about Jane Eyre for a long time before I read it. Handsome Mr Rochester with his gothic dash and flair, plain Jane with her habit of lurking in window seats; it was an archetype of one kind of love affair, and in its way more sympathetic than the more glamorous coupling of Heathcliff and Cathy. More sympathetic because more encouraging to an adolescent (regardless of their gender) with low self-esteem. Then there was the mad woman in the attic. Didn't all homes have such a creature - even when there was no attic and no lunatic - in the sense that the attic was a head space as well as a room space, in which invisible injustices and wildness were stored, ready to burst into the world and create havoc at any moment?

I expect I saw a film version too, which would have reinforced all these impressions. But the book itself ... I didn't read it until I went to work at the University of Hull in 1976 when I was 23 and found that I had to teach it. Although I still feel embarrassed to have arrived at the table too late, I comfort myself by thinking that at least I was more or less ready for it.

Ready, in particular, for something I'd not previously known about. Which is Brontë's very clever meshing of a plausibly rendered world (and I could easily see how well rendered by visiting Haworth from Hull), with a world that is pretty much pure fantasy. I don't just mean fantasy in terms of those gothic elements, but in the bending of hard facts (the contemporary laws of the land) to bring Jane to her eventual reward. In this respect, the book is truthful about cruelty (Bertha's fate, especially), but it is also life-affirming. The central tension between actualities and make-believe anticipates the tragic plea at the end of Villette: "leave sunny imaginations hope".

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Bertha by Paula Rego. Illustration: Copyright Paula Rego. Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art

Maggie O'Farrell

Like many people, I first read Jane Eyre in my early teens, in the first flush of excitement at swapping my children's library card for an adult one. The back cover promised a thrilling love story between a poor, plain girl and a brooding, troubled landowner. Later that night, I found myself wrong-footed. What, I wondered, was this neglect and abuse of an orphan child? Whose was this frank, unwavering voice? By the time Jane was locked by her heartless aunt into the terrifying red room, I had forgotten all about the promised love story. I pressed on, late into the night, straight into Lowood and the deprivations at the hands of religious fanatics.

I had, in short, never read anything like it. The shock and thrill of discovering this book, aged 13, continues to run in my veins. I read it without a single preconception; I knew nothing about it. I was as unprepared as those first Victorian readers for Rochester, for the fire, for the stalled marriage, for the lunatic locked away in the attic.

If Jane Eyre taught me anything as an astonished 13-year-old, it was to strive, to push my reach beyond my grasp, not to settle for compromise. When we studied the book at university, Brontë's words were filtered for me through various frameworks of academic theory. Jane Eyre is a feminist novel, I was told. Or it is the link between the epistolary and the gothic novel. It is the precursor to all stream-of-consciousness writing. It is a psychological tract about doubles and doppelgangers, addressing levels of human consciousness. It is all these things and yet none of them. One of the reasons Jane Eyre continues to provoke so much discussion and theorising is that, like Jane herself, it eludes definition. It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left.

Thirty years on, I still haven't read anything like it. Jane Eyre remains the book I return to the most. I read it every couple of years. Parts I know off by heart, yet each time I come away with something different. It is my datum, my pole star, the novel by which all others shall be measured.

Polly Samson

I read Wide Sargasso Sea before I ever got to Jane Eyre. It wasn't until my youngest son was set Jane Eyre for A-level that I finally read it (I thought I had but it turned out I'd only osmosed it from the air and screen). Wide Sargasso Sea, I'd read several times. Reading them the wrong way round, which happens to be chronologically the right way round, does rather spoil the romance: leaving you alert to a morally derelict rather than a Byronic Rochester. Jane falls for a man whose degeneracy and sadism drove his first wife mad. Lushly erotic and deeply disturbing, Rhys's book bleeds very darkly into Brontë's.

Throughout the exquisite suffering and withholding dance of Jane and Rochester's courtship, you are thinking, 'Please no, Jane, not after all we've been through so intimately together, the beatings and privations, the humiliations and near-starvations. Did love deafen you when he told you of roaming Europe and setting up home with three separate courtesans? What of his STDs?'

And what of poor little Adèle, the abandoned child of his Parisian mistress? There he is, pampering her with cadeaux while referring to her repeatedly and within her hearing as "it", and remarking on her stupidity. Why did he take her in if he despises her so? And then, Rhys whispers in your ear and you shudder to remember that in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester has sex with a servant girl, who can't have been more than a child.

And on to the spectacle of the mad woman in his attic: unkempt and ugly, raving and knifing and biting. Rhys won't allow you to dismiss her as some sort of mythical vampyre, or even Jane's rebellious alter ego. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she is a beautiful but fragile Creole heiress whom Rochester marries for her fortune, and on his honeymoon is already resenting for her "disconcertingly non-European" eyes.

It is never made clear in Jane Eyre from what form of madness the first Mrs Rochester is suffering. Something must have turned her from a beautiful bride into this swollen, purple monster. Given what Brontë tells us of his decade-long lost weekend, does it seem unlikely that Rochester has given her syphilis?

And then, up on the roof, among the flames of Thornfield Hall, Rochester loses his hand, his left hand, the one he gave in marriage. According to Jane Eyre, the woman he gave it to jumps, thus freeing him to marry Jane. Oh dear. Reader, I can't help but think he pushed her.

Helen Dunmore

What I love most about Jane Eyre is the ferocity of her radicalism. She refuses to see the world as it tells her it should be seen. She will speak out, although she is a friendless nobody: small, pale, plain and female. From the first page there are hints of the fire that burns in her. Jane is out of favour, banished from the family hearth. She hides away in her own no man's land, a window seat where she sits "cross-legged, like a Turk", revelling in the pages of Bewick's History of British Birds. A drawn red curtain conceals her from the room, while the glass protects her from "ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly from a long and lamentable blast".

Jane Eyre is between two worlds and belongs in neither, although she will have to live in both during the course of the novel. She will be a beggar-maid, exposed on the moors, and a princess wooed by the King of Thornfield Hall, Mr Rochester. Neither will satisfy her. Jane's quest is long and solitary, and she is protected only by her fiery spirit and incisive intelligence. But if Jane Eyre has fairytale and mythic qualities, she is also an intensely political creation. Jane genuinely does not believe that morality has anything to do with wealth, power or social standing. She repudiates the idea that women's mental capacities are less than those of men. She would rather live alone than accept a relationship that compromises her independence. Strong stuff even in our times, but revolutionary in 1847. At 10 years old she castigates rich, powerful Mrs Reed for her hypocrisy and cruelty. At 18 she sets out into the world to support herself, having done everything possible to secure an education.

Her relationship with Mr Rochester is, to put it mildly, challenging. She will not be flattered: she must be an equal. Is Jane Eyre lovable? Perhaps not. She is intensely critical, and quick to scorn. There is no warmth of humour in her. She is elemental, with "rather a look of another world" as Rochester says, and yet at times extraordinarily prosaic. But if not lovable, she is utterly compelling. There was no one like Jane Eyre before she blazed on to the page, and into a million imaginations.

Blake Morrison

I grew up not many miles from Haworth, in a vicarage at the top of a village; my mother, like Patrick Brontë, had come from Ireland; the landscape we looked out on resembled the one Jane Eyre wanders through after fleeing Thornfield Hall: "[the roads] are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows wild and deep." The novel wasn't on the syllabus at my grammar school; no self-respecting teenage boy would have wanted to be seen with it. But the sense of recognition I felt when I read it was immense. All adolescents feel like victims, and the mistreatment of Jane in the early chapters, first by Mrs Reed then by Mr Brocklehurst, put me firmly on her side. I too knew what it was like to be humiliated in class (the slate-dropping episode) and to lose a close friend (as she does Helen Burns). I too distrusted wealth and finery. Never mind Jane's gender: it was the two of us against the world! Whether Mr Rochester would prove worthy seemed doubtful. The romantic denouement engaged me less than the impediments along the way: Miss Ingram; mad Bertha (we too had a scary attic); the halting of the wedding ceremony. But I liked the teasing and banter, and there were ideas to grapple with, too, about class and work and beauty. Above all, there was Jane's denunciation of female servitude. Women, she says, "need exercise for their faculties ... they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded ... to say they ought to confine themselves to making puddings".A hundred and twenty years after the book came out, that idea still met occasional resistance, especially in laddish rural outposts. But Jane Eyre showed it was plain common sense. Soon we'd all be reading The Female Eunuch. But Charlotte Brontë led the way.

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Jane and Helen by Paula Rego. Illustration: Copyright Paula Rego. Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art

Julie Myerson

I first read Jane Eyre propped up in my little single bed with a shawl around my shoulders in a cold and creaking attic room at the top of a house in the middle of the starless Nottinghamshire countryside. The room, my old and once beloved bedroom, was badly lit, unheated, dusty and forlorn. It hadn't always been so. But that summer our mother had left our father in a most spectacular fashion - at dead of night, taking half the furniture, all our pets and all three of us children with her. And my father vented his rage in the only way he knew how: by replacing nothing, leaving the house - and especially our bedrooms - to grow sad and dusty and unloved, a reminder each time we visited (fortnightly as the court decreed) of how our terrible mother had ruined our once "happy" family life.

I could not have wished for a better setting in which to get to know the Brontës. Charlotte, Emily, Anne - all of them kept me company in that cold and sad little room. I was 13 and I knew very little about anything, but suddenly here it all was: injustice and illness, death, shame, fear and secrecy - not to mention the possibility of love in unexpected or even inconvenient places.

I have read the novel since and always found something new to love. But my abiding sense of it then, as well as now, is of Jane herself - her sheer, steady-hearted goodness. Throughout the novel, from start to finish, she unwaveringly tells the truth. Such clarity and, in an odd way, such calm. It felt like something worth aspiring to. It still does.

Cornelia Parker

I identified strongly with Jane and her painful childhood when I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager as I was having quite a painful one myself (though perhaps not as bad as hers). So later in the book when she overcame her shyness, threw off her childhood problems and then became this incredibly strong woman, it was emotional and cathartic. I reread it in 2006 when on a residency at Haworth Parsonage. Back in London in the British Library I actually got to leaf through the original text, neatly written in three musty notebooks. She had obviously copied out the manuscript many times but this was her final draft, so seeing where she had deleted a single word here and there made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There were about 50 corrections in all, which I recorded through photographs: "crimson" was crossed out and replaced by "purple"; "soul" was changed to "spirit", "glimpse" became "idea". I also took images through an electron microscope of tiny punctures in Charlotte's pincushion, holes that she made unconsciously when sewing, and of split ends in the little plait of Emily's hair that had been kept after she died. The Brontës and their characters have attracted so much literary attention, been the subject of so many Hollywood films, it seemed appropriate to work with the seemingly inconsequential traces, the tiny little frictions of everyday life.

When my daughter read it at school a couple of years ago, it was touching to read out passages to one another. The book has stayed with me all my life and I was pleased that she loved it too.

John Mullan

I did not read Jane Eyre until I was in my 20s and fancied I was an educated judge of the means by which novels achieved their effects - but I still found it simply overpowering. The novel's first readers, either appalled or enraptured, thought that they had never heard a narrative voice like Jane Eyre's, so truculent and dissatisfied. And that voice is still the thing. Jane's dissatisfaction is magnificent - a deep hunger for warmth and love, but even more for truth and freedom.

I love the book for refusing to trick you into loving it. Jane Eyre takes the reader into her confidence like no narrator before in English fiction, yet does so in order to correct you, or wrangle with you, or even admonish you. "Oh romantic reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth!" What daring! To invent a narrator who demands our intimacy but remains so intelligently suspicious of our sympathy. She will not charm us: so, though often sardonic, she is almost never humorous ("Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre?" asks Mr Rochester).

Above all, she is weirdly eloquent. I love her strange, elevated language, distilled from religious texts and literary romance - the Bible and Byron stirred together: "Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy." This is Jane recalling how, at 10 years old, she defeats her cruel Aunt Reed in dispute. As everywhere else in Jane Eyre, her highly wrought words make experience fresh and intense once again.

Helen Simpson

I was 10 when first I read Jane Eyre, thrilled that this heroine of a grown-up book was the same age as me, for the first 100 pages at least. The book itself was small, crimson, second-hand, its print fascinatingly spidery on very thin paper. I asked for another one like that when my 11th birthday came round and received a Brontë bargain bumper-pack. More than three inches thick and almost 3lbs in weight (I've just checked), three sisters for the price of one, it lumped Emily and Anne in with Charlotte.

Having said thank you, I returned discreetly to the little second-hand edition. The child heroine's first-person centrality, her super-sensitivity to injustice and her impassioned yet powerless state all commanded my readerly identification. Jane and I were one as we defied Aunt Reed, rubbed our chilblains, revered -reading Helen Burns, raged at the headband marked "Slattern". Ah, the solace of Miss Temple's seed cake! And how rousing were Jane's regular Miltonic blasts against tyranny; though I find on recent rereading that she was not quite the revolutionary I took her for (domestic endearment and household joys are "the best things the world has", she declares to refrigerator suitor St John Rivers somewhere in Jane Eyre 's remaining four-fifths). Even so, who could resist a novel where the heroine sets her course by the moral compass of Bunyan's pilgrim while her passions blaze with Byronic ardour from beginning to end? I took it to heart when I was 10, and there it has stayed.

Polly Teale

When I reread Jane Eyre as an adult it was not the horror story I remembered, but a psychological drama of the most potent kind. Everyone and everything seemed larger than life, as if seen through the magnifying glass of Jane's psyche, a reflection of her inner world. Like many others I was curious as to why Brontë had invented a madwoman locked in an attic to torment her heroine? I was intrigued by the mythic power of Bertha Mason, by Brontë's repulsion and attraction to her own creation. Her danger and eroticism. Her terrifying rage. Why was Jane, a seemingly rational young woman, haunted by a vengeful she devil? (I was inspired to write my play After Mrs Rochester, about Jean Rhys, while adapting for the theatre.)

Of course, the novel begins with another image of incarceration: another female locked up for breaking the rules. Jane Eyre is shut in the red room when, for the first time in her life, she allows her temper to erupt. Jane is told "God will strike you dead in the midst of one of your tantrums". She is so terrified she loses consciousness. The message is clear: for a girl to express her passionate nature is to invite the severest of punishments. Jane must keep her fiery spirit locked away if she is to survive. Like Jane (and Brontë herself), I understood this fear of one's own nature. A large part of the novel's power lies in our knowledge of the passionate forbidden self that lurks beneath the controlled exterior of our heroine.

Although Brontë spent most of her life in a remote Yorkshire village, she longed to travel beyond the horizon of her restricted existence. She and her siblings read the travelogues at the back of their father's newspaper, recycling them into fantastical stories. It is significant that Bertha is a foreigner. She comes from the world of Brontë's imagination, from a land of tropical storms and hurricanes. She is both dangerous and exciting. She is passionate and sexual. She is angry and violent. The embodiment of everything that Jane, a Victorian woman, could never be. Is she, I wonder, everything that Brontë feared in herself and longed to express?

Samantha Ellis

The trouble is that I read Wuthering Heights first. I lost my heart to Cathy Earnshaw (and, to be truthful, to Heathcliff), and next to her passion, her wildness, her rage, Jane seemed dull. Why would I read about her stoically suffering at school, plodding through her teaching jobs and marrying her boss when I could rock out with my hairbrush microphone, pretending I was Kate Bush? I was banging on about this when we made the pilgrimage to the moors for my book How to Be a Heroine, and my best friend Emma made me reconsider. She argued that Jane was independent and principled, a woman who stayed true to herself, didn't suffer fools and fought her way to a hard-won happy ending.

Reading Jane Eyre again as an adult was a revelation. I loved how Jane addressed me boldly from the first page, how she challenged the injustices of her aunt's household (a place where books were used as weapons), how she raged at Rochester that "women feel just as men feel" and how she rejected her cousin's passionless proposal, because she wanted love and she didn't see why she shouldn't get it. Plus, with Jane Eyre, you get two heroines in one: angry, misunderstood Bertha is much, much more than just a madwoman in the attic, and nothing in the novel is as powerful as her final moment, standing on the battlements of the house she has set fire to, "black hair ... streaming against the flames".

I am still grateful to Wuthering Heights for encouraging a shy and awkward teenager to be a little wild. I still find Rochester bullying and creepy. And I have started to see how much Charlotte owes to her little sister Anne, who got there first with her portrayal of a plain, poor governess, in . I think I'll be reading (and arguing about) Jane Eyre for the rest of my life.

Mick Jackson

I grew up not far from Haworth so we would spend the occasional day over there, trooping up and down the high street and creeping round the parsonage. When I was about 10 my parents took me to see an adaptation of Jane Eyre at the local cinema. I remember watching Jane breaking the ice on the water to wash in the morning and being made to stand on a stool with a sign around her neck, thinking, "What on earth are we doing watching this poor girl suffer? There's a Bond movie on next door." We had a Penguin edition of Jane Eyre around the house and by the time I finally picked it up, both the story and the author seemed quite familiar - along with the landscape, which was pretty much the one I saw when I stepped out of my front door.

It must have planted a seed of some sort. About 15 years ago I read an article about Haworth being such a popular destination for Japanese tourists that the signposts around the moors are in English and Japanese. On talking to some Japanese visitors I found out that Jane Eyre had been a set text at school and that the Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles adaptation had been on TV when they were growing up. Something about the gothic, romantic elements of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights seemed to appeal to them and had come to represent a certain idea of England/Englishness.

My novel, Yuki Chan in Brontë Country, grew out of those initial conversations: the idea of Haworth as a shrine town; of Charlotte's shoes and locks of hair as sacred relics; and how the Brontës themselves have become characters in a mythology that is quite beyond their realm.

Joanna Briscoe

As a child given to reading on window seats, I was supremely lucky to come across Jane Eyre at the age of the protagonist: 10 when the novel begins. The heroine and inspiration for all of us who were also "obscure, plain and little", Jane was my bookish soulmate with infinitely worse outsider status, providing fuel to every orphan fantasy that would explain my lot. Jane Eyre taught the young reader so much about suffering, about true friendship and love, and about courage. It demanded to be reread many times. To this day, I see Jane as one of the great heroines: she is utterly determined, while not given to flouncy foot stamping in the Scarlett O'Hara, Holly Golightly or Becky Sharp vein, yet more spirited in her integrity than Dorothea Brooke or Esther Summerson.

As a young adult, I deliberately used the novel to initiate weeping sessions in order to siphon off other griefs, and somehow, I now realise, absorbed the desire to marry complex protagonists with dark and twisted storytelling, the novel influencing me as both a writer and reader. Now that it is all less personal and I don't find myself dreaming about my baronial hall catching fire, I regard it as a masterpiece of both entertainment and literature. As with Du Maurier 's , it is clear why some critics regard it as overblown, but I interpret its more gothic elements as intensity rather than excess.

Linda Grant

My Everyman Library copy of Jane Eyre was awarded to me in 1965 when I was 14, and has a bookplate inside announcing that I was the winner of the Rosa Chambers prize for reading aloud (junior). The cover is stamped in gold with the school crest, a young helmeted woman in profile encircled by the motto Knowledge Is No More A Fountain Sealed. The edition dates from 1908 and had been last reprinted in 1963. This is the only copy of Jane Eyre that I have ever owned and the print size is now almost too small to read. The next time I read the novel will be on a Kindle.

My teenage understanding of it - that Reader, she married him - was based on that happy ending, that the heroine had landed the Byronic figure of Rochester. Yet I retained a sense of discomfort, that compared with Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse I could not help but feel that she had been landed with damaged goods. Perhaps the note of quiet triumph in Jane's voice as she announces that she has sealed the deal of marriage has a freight of darkness: Rochester recovers some of his sight but cannot read or write; he can just about make out the face of his son. Rereading many years later, I was extremely curious, as I hadn't been then, about the figure of the mad first wife, the animal-like Bertha, all hair and grunts. In Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea I found the answer to Jane Eyre, that the pale figure glimpsed by Grace Poole had no idea what she was getting into. How perfect was her happiness really and how many couples tell the whole truth about their marriage? I can no longer read Brontë without Rhys.

Sarah Perry

I first read Jane Eyre when I was eight, having mistaken it for a children's book. I had found it on my sister's shelves: a small hardback I recall perfectly, though I last saw it 20 years ago. The covers were glossy white, the paper thin, and there were illustrations throughout. The print was alarmingly small, but it appeared to be about a poor orphan packed off to boarding school before having adventures in a haunted house: all very appealing.

It is rare to be so affected by a book that one remembers exactly where and when one first read it, but I know that I knelt to read and from the first line - "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" - was enthralled. Of course much of it passed me by - but I'd been raised on a rich and frequently indigestible diet of the King James Bible, and was used to breaking my teeth on hard sentences. What I understood, I understood with awe, amazement and absolute belief. I am certain it has formed my idea of all that is desirable in literature and life: the indomitable heroine concealing the heart of an eagle in the body of a sparrow; the tenderness of friends; the anguished tussle between love and honour; the strangeness and power of religion; the potency of the natural world; the danger of madness and deceit; the irresistible compulsion between a man and a woman who ought, really, to want nothing to do with each other.

It is years since I last read it, but certain phrases are as familiar and dear to me as holy writ; not least when I feel - as Jane so often felt - diminished, uncertain, torn between irreconcilable imperatives: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."

Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracy Chevalier, is published by HarperCollins. is reissued this month as a Vintage Classic.

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Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others

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I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester.

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Chapter by chapter description of Wuthering Heights

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A short summary of each chapter in Wuthering Heights so you can go straight to the correct location.

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The reader’s guide to Emily Bronte’s classic ‘Wuthering Heights’

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A guide to Emily Bronte’s masterpiece about Cathy and Heathcliff - a tale of love and revenge on the Yorkshire moors. Summaries, character details, maps and timelines - all here.

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(1813)

Jane Austen began her second novel, Pride and Prejudice, before she was twenty-one. It was originally titled First Impression because the appearances of the characters created the plot of the novel. However, because the novel is also concerned with the effects of the character's first impressions, that is their prejudice, Austen found the title Pride and Prejudice more appropriate.

Similar to other Austen novels, this is written in gentle or Horacian satire. The main object of Austen's satire in the novel is the mercenary and the ignorance of the people, a common criticism of the 18th century. Characters in the novel which best carries these qualities are:

Mrs. Bennet, a foolish woman who talks too much and is obsessed with getting her daughters married;

Lydia Bennet, the youngest of the Bennet daughter who is devoted to a life of dancing, fashions, gossips and flirting; and

Mr. Williams Collins, the silly and conceited baboon who is completely stupify by Lady Catherine in every aspect of his life that he has forgotten his own morals and duty.

The tone of the novel is light, satirical, and vivid. Scenes such as Mr. Collins proposal to Elizabeth, and Lady Catherine visits to Lizzy at Longbourn, provides comic relief to the reader while at the same time revealing certain traits of the characters. For example, Lydia's lack of common sense and responsibility is revealed when she takes pride in being the first Bennet girl to be married. Lydia does not take into consideration the circumstance of her marriage, the personality of her husband, or the prospects of their marriage for the future. Elizabeth Bennet's ability to laugh off her misfortune and to continue to be optimistic, considering her situation, also contributes to the tone of the novel.

The point of view in Pride and Prejudice is limited omniscient; the story is told through Elizabeth, but not in first person. As a result, the mood of the novel lacks dramatic emotions. The atmosphere is intellectual and cold; there are little descriptions of the setting. The main actions of the novel are the interactions between opinions, ideas, and attitudes, which weaves and advances the plot of the novel. The emotions in the novel are to be perceived beneath the surface of the story and are not to be expressed to the readers directly.

Austen's powers of subtle discrimination and shrewd perceptiveness is revealed in Pride and Prejudice; she is able to convey such a complex message using a simple, yet witty, style.

The main subject in the novel is stated in the first sentence of the novel: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." In this statement, Austen has cleverly done three things: she has declared that the main subject of the novel will be courtship and marriage, she has established the humorous tone of the novel by taking a simple subject to elaborate and to speak intelligently of, and she has prepared the reader for a chase in the novel of either a husband in search of a wife, or a women in pursuit of a husband.

The first line also defines Austen's book as a piece of literature that connects itself to the 18th century period. Pride and Prejudice is 18th century because of the emphasis on man in his social environment rather than in his individual conditions. The use of satire and wit, a common form of 18th century literature, also contributes to label the book as 18th century. However, because Austen had allowed personal feelings of the characters to be expressed in her work, she can also be classified as Romantic. In the figure of Elizabeth, Austen shows passion attempting to find a valid mode of existence in society. Passion and reason also comes together in the novel to show that they are complementary of marriage.

There are seven different marriages presented in the novel. Excluding the Gardiner and the Lucas, the remaining five marriages contrasts each other to reveal Austen's opinions and thoughts on the subject of marriage.

The marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth reveals the characteristics that constitute a successful marriage. One of these characteristics is that the feeling cannot be brought on by appearances, and must gradually develop between the two people as they get to know one another. In the beginning, Elizabeth and Darcy were distant from each other because of their prejudice. The series of events which they both experienced gave them the opportunity to understand one another and the time to reconcile their feelings for each other. Thus, their mutual understanding is the foundation of their relationship and will lead them to a peaceful and lasting marriage. This relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy reveals the importance of getting to know one's partner before marrying.

The marriage between Jane Bennet and Bingley is also an example of successful marriage. Austen, through Elizabeth, expresses her opinion of this in the novel:

"....really believed all his [Bingley] expectations of felicity, to be rationally founded, because they had for basis the excellent understanding, and super-excellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and himself." (Chapter 55)

However, unlike Darcy and Elizabeth, there is a flaw in their relationship. The flaw is that both characters are too gullible and too good-hearted to ever act strongly against external forces that may attempt to separate them:

"You [Jane and Bingley] are each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income." (Chapter 55)

Obviously, Lydia and Wickham's marriage is an example of a bad marriage. Their marriage was based on appearances, good looks, and youthful vivacity. Once these qualities can no longer be seen by each other, the once strong relationship will slowly fade away. As in the novel, Lydia and Wickham's marriage gradually disintegrates; Lydia becomes a regular visitor at her two elder sister's home when "her husband was gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath." Through their relationship, Austen shows that hasty marriage based on superficial qualities quickly cools and leads to unhappiness.

Although little is told of how Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet got together, it can be inferred by their conversions that their relationship was similar to that of Lydia and Wickham--Mr. Bennet had married a woman he found sexually attractive without realizing she was an unintelligent woman. Mrs. Bennet's favoritism towards Lydia and her comments on how she was once as energetic as Lydia reveals this similarity. Mr. Bennet's comment on Wickham being his favorite son-in-law reinforces this parallelism. The effect of the relationships was that Mr. Bennet would isolate himself from his family; he found refuge in his library or in mocking his wife. Mr. Bennet's self-realization at the end of the novel in which he discovers that his lack of attention towards his family had led his family to develop the way they are, was too late to save his family. He is Austen's example of a weak father. In these two latter relationships, Austen shows that it is necessary to use good judgement to select a spouse, otherwise the two people will lose respect for each other.

The last example of a marriage is of a different nature than the ones mentioned above. The marriage between Mr. Collins and Charlotte is based on economics rather than on love or appearance. It was a common practice during Austen's time for women to marry a husband to save herself from spinsterhood or to gain financial security. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen dramatizes gender inequality and shows that women who submit themselves to this type of marriage will have to suffer in tormenting silence as Charlotte does:

"When Mr. Collins said any thing of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she [Elizabeth] would involuntarily turned her eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear." (Chapter 28)

These five marriages contribute to the theme that a happy and strong marriage takes time to build and must be based on mutual feeling, understanding, and respect. Hasty marriages acting on impulse, and based on superficial qualities will not survive and will lead to inevitable unhappiness.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen has denounced the elements of marriage and society that she found distasteful. These are the conclusions of her observation of the people in her world. However in her writing, Jane has also reflected her own enjoyment in life among these people with and without their faults.

What does Ms. Austen try to tell me? That pride and prejudice are bad habits that interfere with personal relationships? Yes, but that is not new. Plenty of warnings against these social evils can be found in the world's great and small religious teachings. Ms. Austin deftly employs some of our shortcomings to give me a sketch of some of English society of her time without moralizing. Ask me what I think makes this work so enduring and I will answer: "it is so entertaining". I am certain that Ms. Austin wants her readers to experience a broad range of genuine emotions and she has succeeded with me. I can imagine the "oh no!" of her first female readers when they found that Lydia Bennett had eloped with Mr. Wickham. There are numerous scenes in the novel which we would name "situation comedy" today. If these were turned into TV series the producers would lard them with artificial laughter because Ms. Austen wanted her readers to snicker if not laugh often. It begins on page 1 of the novel when Mr. Bennett asks the immortal question whether Mr. Bingley has rented his estate expressly to hook one of the Bennett girls. Allow me a comment on the name Darcy which is of French origin and means that this old aristocratic family came from the town of Arcy (stress on the last syllable). We know how that family came to England. When William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel there was a well-known D'Arcy in his retinue. That Darcy remained in England.--Submitted by Dieter Heymann.

Pride and prejudice have existed in the catalogue of human behaviour patterns from time immemorial. They are the two elements that Jane Austen chose to write her story around. Although a periodic tale, Pride and Prejudice is timeless in its core content. Jane Austen compiled a historical diary of life and times in the English middle classes, based around the Regency period that stretched on until the year 1830 or so. Whilst she wrote of an everyday lifestyle she was herself experiencing to some degree, she added threads of romance, fantasy and intrigue that belied her position of a woman who never married and spoke but once of any romantic encounters in her own life, yet portrays all the elements of classic romantic fiction without ever descending to sugar-sweet coyness or overt morality. Pride and Prejudice has a central love story in the making, rather than the telling, and one that only really begins at the book's end. It is an enjoyable journey through a world of coach-trips and candlelight and needs nothing more than the magic of the author's pen to weave it all together into an enjoyable and intriguing read that appeals to everyone.

The characters are memorable not from excess heroism or exceptional personality, but from those who range from idiocy and meanness of spirit to pillars of respectability and virtue. Without a single one of the protagonists deemed unnecessary to the tale, their characters draw on a whole range of the readers interests, evoking every feeling in the spectrum of human emotions. Jane Austen rarely describes the physical attributes of her characters in any depth, perhaps preferring to let the readers use their imaginations and form their own opinions. This regardless, it is almost impossible to read the book without being left with the feeling of knowing each and every one of them with some intimacy. Two hundred years after it first graced the bookshelves of its readers, Pride and Prejudice lives on as strongly as ever.--Submitted by Jim Morris

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Recent Forum Posts on Pride and Prejudice

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Searchable etext. Discuss with other readers.

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Scena tratta dal film "Whutering Heights" del 1992 con Juliette Binoche e Ralph Fiennes. Catherine: "Nelly?" Nelly: "Oh, Cathy! I thought you were Frances, risen from the dead." Catherine: "Nelly, will you keep a secret for me?" Nelly: "Oh, is it worth keeping?" Catherine: "Today, Edgar Linton asked me to marry him."

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A song by Kate Bush

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Elaine  Showalter  talks about   Mrs Dalloway

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Elaine  Showalter  talks about   Mrs Dalloway

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An intresting introduction to the masterpiece by V.Woolf

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Professor Elaine Showalter explores modernity, consciousness, gender and time in Virginia Woolf's ground-breaking work, 'Mrs Dalloway'. The film is shot around the streets of London, as well as at the British Library and at Gordon Square in Bloomsbury where Virginia and her siblings lived in the early 20th century.

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Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (Audiobook)

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Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

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The Queen of the Short Story

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A Doll's House

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The Doll's House - by Katherine Mansfield

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by Katherine Mansfield When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll's house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door.

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Studying " A Room of One's Own"

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SparkNotes: A Room of One's Own: Themes, Motifs & Symbols

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Description and explanation of the major themes of A Room of One's Own. This accessible literary criticism is perfect for anyone faced with A Room of One's Own essays, papers, tests, exams, or for anyone who needs to create a A Room of One's Own lesson plan.

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SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER

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It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because-this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say, in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's History of England. Once more I looked up Women, found 'position of' and turned to the pages indicated. 'Wife-beating', I read, 'was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low. . . . Similarly,' the historian goes on, 'the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the "chivalrous" upper classes. . . . Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge.' That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. 'It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so,' Professor Trevelyan concludes, 'neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.' Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time-Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes-the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women 'lacking in personality and character.' Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

'It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the "misogynist" Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?'- F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact-that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either-that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings that it meant --

'The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture . . . The Cistercians and Sheep-farming . . . The Crusades.. . The University . . . The House of Commons . . . The Hundred Years' War . . . The Wars of the Roses . . . The Renaissance Scholars . . . The Dissolution of the Monasteries . . . Agrarian and Religious Strife . . . The Origin of English Sea-power. .. The Armada . . . ' and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian's view of the past. Nor shall we find her in collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought-and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?-is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history, calling it, of course, by some in conspicuous name so that women might figure there with out impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the back ground, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably-his mother was an heiress-to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin-Ovid, Virgil and Horace-and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter-indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager-a fat, loose-lipped man-guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting-no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted-you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last-for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows-at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so-who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?-killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was-it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born to-day among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.

This may be true or it may be false-who can say?-but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational-for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons-but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation? I asked. Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and by chance that he 'never blotted a line'. Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their lives also were Written, and their letters were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming death and the indifference of the world.

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. 'Mighty poets in their misery dead'- that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion-but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr Oscar Browning, because Mr Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare 'that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man'. After saying that Mr Browning went back to his rooms-and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and majesty-he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on the sofa -'a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the full use of his limbs. That's Arthur" [said Mr Browning]. "He's a dear boy really and most high-minded. --The two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do.

But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. 'See what Mr Oscar Browning says,' he would say; and there so was not only Mr Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr Greg-the 'essentials of a woman's being', said Mr Greg emphatically, 'are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men '- there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion-you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that-to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of women who try to write music. 'Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr Johnson's dictum concerning, a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. "Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all." So accurately does history repeat itself.

A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, P. 246.

Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr Oscar Browning's life and pushing away the rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deepseated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: ' . . . notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or any other serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask'd).' And so she goes on to spend her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever, upon that immensely important subject, Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory-but she would need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.

But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodledum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms-or is it only bed-sitting-rooms?-of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare-compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton-is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some 'revelation' which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.

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It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because-this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water.

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A brief biography of three of the most acclaimed writers in all of English literature, narrated by Daphne the household robot. For lots more about famous writers, visit www.simoncheshire.co.uk

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Jane Austen's novels are so readable in part because she wasn't an ordinary kind of novelist: she wanted her work to help us to be better and wiser people. Her novels had a philosophy of personal development at their heart.