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Just don't hurl them at your English teacher...

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Shakespeare Insults: 55 Shakespearean Insults & Put Downs

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So you think you know a foul word or two? Check out the ultimate guide to Shakespeare insults. #1. 'Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat' - genius!

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How many words can you make with 7 letters?

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How many words can you make with 7 letters?

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The Best Oscar Wilde Poems Everyone Should Read

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The Best Oscar Wilde Poems Everyone Should Read

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Are these Oscar Wilde’s finest poems? Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was best-known for being Oscar Wilde. As is often remarked, he was one of the first modern celebrities, courting attention for his witty conversation, his flamboyant dress, and - later - his 'scandalous' sex life. But he was also a playwright, novelist, short-story writer, writer of charming fairy tales for children, and poet. This last one is often overlooked, with only one of this poems remaining widely known. In the following list, we pick six of Oscar Wilde's best poems ranging from his early years at Oxford through to his years in exile in Paris.
1. 'Requiescat'.
Its title taken from the Latin for '(may he or she) rest in peace', this short poem is one of Wilde's most understated and touching, about a dead loved one who is now buried underground. The poem was inspired by the death of someone Wilde was very close to: his own sister. Isola Wilde died, aged just nine, in 1867; Wilde wrote this moving elegy for Isola in 1881. 'All my life's buried here, / Heap earth upon it' is one of Wilde's most moving poetic lines (or couple of lines) because they are simple yet heartfelt.
2. 'The Burden of Itys'.
In Greek mythology, Itys was the son of Tereus and Procne. Tereus raped his wife's sister Philomela, and cut out her tongue so she couldn't tell anyone about what he'd done. However, Philomela 'told' her sister by weaving a tapestry depicting the appalling crime, and Procne took revenge on her husband by killing their son Itys and serving him up as a meal for Tereus. Wilde's poem doesn't explicitly refer to this myth, but this is the background to a long poem about Oxford (where Wilde studied as an undergraduate) which Wilde continued to think highly of for the rest of his life, thinking it one of his finest poems.
3. 'The Garden of Eros'.
Another poem which Wilde himself numbered among his best poems, 'The Garden of Eros', like much of Wilde's poetry, bears the stamp of Swinburne's influence, along with the more sensual poems of Keats and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. As the poem's title suggests, 'The Garden of Eros' is full of lush eroticism and decadent imagery, depicting a utopian world that recalls the pagan Arcadia more than the Biblical Eden...
4. 'A Villanelle'.
O singer of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?

Still through the ivy flits the bee
Where Amaryllis lies in state;
O Singer of Persephone!

Simaetha calls on Hecate
And hears the wild dogs at the gate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?

So begins this poem, an example of the villanelle form. In a separate post, we've compiled some of the best villanelles written in English, but we didn't include this Wilde poem on the list. Wilde didn't write hundreds of poems, but among the small number he did write we find sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, elegies, and many others - including this attempt at the restrictive and challenging form of the villanelle. This poem, which addresses Persephone from the world of mythology, may not be the finest example of a villanelle, but it shows Wilde's virtuosity in verse as well as, perhaps, highlighting the limits of his own verse.
5. 'The Sphinx'.
Wilde wrote on a number of occasions about sphinxes, with one of his characters describing women, memorably, as 'sphinxes without secrets'. In this poem, which is a prime example of the luxurious indulgence of Decadent poetry, the narrator encounters the mysterious sphinx ('half woman and half animal': the sphinx being a cross between a woman and a cat) and, essentially, asks her some very personal questions about the lovers she's had over the centuries. A fine example of fin de siècle decadence, and one of Wilde's most intriguing poems.
6. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.
We conclude this list with Wilde's most famous poem. In November 1895, having spent a short time in Wandsworth prison, Wilde was moved to HM Prison, Reading to serve the rest of his two-year sentence of hard labour. But Wilde's poem was inspired not only by his own incarceration there, but by the execution of a soldier - the first at the prison for eighteen years - for the murder of his wife. The repeated line, 'Each man kills the thing he loves', takes on a wider metaphorical significance in the context of Wilde's own life.

For a good edition of Oscar Wilde's poetry, we recommend Complete Poetry (Oxford World's Classics)

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The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

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The Best Oscar Wilde Poems Everyone Should Read

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Are these Oscar Wilde's finest poems? Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was best-known for being Oscar Wilde. As is often remarked, he was one of the first modern celebrities, courting attention for his witty conversation, his flamboyant dress, and - later - his 'scandalous' sex life.

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Some recommendations for Sci-Fi fans or those looking for a place to start!

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The 15 Best Sci-Fi Books I've Ever Read [Updated]

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Explore the powerful poetry of Audre Lorde

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Explore the powerful poetry of Audre Lorde

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A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

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A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: "I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn't find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that's what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen."

Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy-as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia-went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde's contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as "The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master's House."

Lorde's early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. "I have a duty," Lorde once stated, "to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain." Lorde's later poems were often assembled from personal journals. Explaining the genesis of "Power," a poem about the police shooting of a ten-year-old black child, Lorde discussed her feelings when she learned that the officer involved had been acquitted: "A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are that poem."

Her poetry, and "indeed all of her writing," according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, "rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling." Concerned with modern society's tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as "lesbian" and "black woman." She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde's poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: "My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds... [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms's objection to my work is not about obscenity ... or even about sex. It is about revolution and change."

Lorde was a noted prose writer as well as poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde confronts the possibility of death. Recounting this personal transformation led Lorde to address the silence surrounding cancer, illness, and the lived experience of women. For example, Lorde explained her decision not to wear a prosthesis after undergoing a mastectomy in the Journals: "Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of 'Nobody will know the difference.' But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other."

Lorde's 1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, was described by its publishers as a "biomythography, combining elements of history, biography and myth." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) collected Lorde's nonfiction prose and has become a canonical text in Black studies, women's studies, and queer theory. Another collection of essays, A Burst of Light (1988), won the National Book Award. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997.

In 1981 Lorde and fellow writers Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of black feminists. Lorde would also become increasingly concerned over the plight of black women in South Africa under apartheid, creating Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and remaining an active voice on behalf of these women throughout the remainder of her life. Lorde addressed her concerns to not only the United States but the world, encouraging a celebration of the differences that society instead used as tools of isolation. As Allison Kimmich noted in Feminist Writers, "Throughout all of Audre Lorde's writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. The black lesbian feminist poet activist reminds her readers that they ignore differences among people at their peril ... Instead, Lorde suggests, differences in race or class must serve as a 'reason for celebration and growth.'"

Lorde's honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College, Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. Warrior Poet (2006), by Alexis De Veaux, is the first full-length biography of Audre Lorde.

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A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools...

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Listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson's poetry of Black Power

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Listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson's poetry of Black Power

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Linton Kwesi Johnson was a key player in the British Black Power movement, joining the Black Panthers while at school and setting up a poetry workshop within it.

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Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August, 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, attended Tulse Hill secondary school, and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths' College, University of London (graduating in 1973), which currently holds his personal papers in its archives. While still at school he joined the Black Panthers, helping to organise a poetry workshop within the movement. In 1977 he was awarded a C. Day Lewis Fellowship, and was the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of Black theatre and art.

Much of Johnson's poetry is political, dealing primarily with the experiences of being an African-Caribbean in Britain. "Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon", he told an interviewer in 2008. He has also written about issues such as British foreign policy, and the death of anti-racist marcher Blair Peach. His most striking and celebrated work was arguably produced in the 1980's, with Johnson's spirit of anger and protest finding its ideal subject and opposite under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. Poems such as 'Sonny's Lettah' and 'Di Great Insohreckshan' (both featured here) contain accounts of police brutality upon young black men, and capture the period's unwritten attitude of resistance and antagonism in their empathic descriptions of rioting and imprisonment. Told via the uncompromising, yet generous and inventive use of unstandardised Jamaican patois, the poems are alive with Johnson's relish of the tics and rhythms of spoken language.

Johnson's poems first appeared in the journal Race Today, who published his debut collection, Voices of the Living and the Dead, in 1974. His second collection, Dread Beat An' Blood, was published in 1975 by Bogle-L'Ouverture, and shares its title with his first LP, released by Virgin in 1978. That year also saw the release of a documentary film about Johnson's work of the same name. Inglan Is A Bitch, his third book, came out in 1980. Johnson's record label, LKJ Records, was launched in 1981 and has released work by some of the most prominent Jamaican dub poets. His own recordings are amongst the top-selling reggae albums in the world. In 2005 he was awarded a silver Musgrave medal from the Institute of Jamaica for distinguished eminence in the field of poetry. Johnson is the second living poet, and the only black poet, to be published in the Penguin Classics series: Mi Revalueshanary Fren in 2002, with a Selected following in 2006.

Linton Kwesi Johnson has generously given the Poetry Archive permission to use these recordings taken from his CD LKJ A Cappella Live, which includes previously unpublished works. The energy of his live recitals gives the recordings a unique electricity, interspersed with the laughter and applause of audiences around Europe. While his work is unremittingly hostile towards the situations of oppression it pits itself against, and his performance style is sometimes confrontational, Johnson's readings are always firstly inclusive, insisting that his audience see events from what 20 years ago was the 'other side' of the traditional view of social history, but has overwhelmingly come to be shared as the just and appropriate one. Such a shift in our cultural perspective is at least partly a testament to the power and influence of Johnson's work, openly and unashamedly political, which seeks constantly to defy the adage that 'poetry makes nothing happen'. As a poet unusually and refreshingly aware of the function and responsibility of that role, Johnson's readings of his poems range from incendiary, to lamenting, to the intelligence and good humour of 'If I Wos a Tap-Natch Poet', which appraises and embraces his position as a spokesperson for social justice and for joyful celebration, while displaying his gifts as an inimitable poet who always speaks with his 'own sense of time'.
Linton Kwesi Johnson's Favourite Poetry Saying:
"Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon." - Linton Kwesi Johnson

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Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August, 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, attended Tulse Hill secondary school, and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths' College, University...

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Dickens's Oliver Twist depicts the excitement as well as the danger surrounding the criminal underworld. Here Professor Philip Horne examines how Dickens’s portrayal of crime was influenced by public executions, contemporary criminal slang and other sensational literary works.

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Oliver Twist shows both the enticement and the danger of the criminal underworld. Professor Philip Horne examines how Dickens's depiction of crime was influenced by public executions, contemporary slang and other literary works.

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Check out the radical poems of Benjamin Zephaniah

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Check out the radical poems of Benjamin Zephaniah

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British Library: Black Literature Timeline

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British Library: Black Literature Timeline

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This literary timeline explores the history of Black literature and writing in Britain through around 50 texts. It includes works by writers living and working in Britain, as well as titles first published here and authored by people who were born in former British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Americas.

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Read some of the stories shortlisted for the BBC Young Writers Award

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Read some of the stories shortlisted for the BBC Young Writers Award

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And maybe even prepare to enter next year's competition...

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The BBC and Cambridge English

In 2018, the University of Cambridge partnered with BBC Radio to support the National Short Story Award, and with BBC Radio and the leading creative-writing charity, First Story, to support the Young Writers' Award and the Student Critics' Award. These short story awards highlight the University's commitment to the short story form, to bringing it to a wider audience, and to encouraging creative writing and critical reading in young people across the country.

The University of Cambridge has a rich heritage of investigating storytelling for eight hundred years and producing first-rate writers including those who excel at the short story form such as AS Byatt, Helen Oyeyemi and Zadie Smith. It also has a thriving new Centre for Creative Writing, based at the Institute of Continuing Education, which sponsors the awards along with the Faculty of English, the School of Arts and Humanities, and the University Library.

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In 2018, the University of Cambridge partnered with BBC Radio to support the National Short Story Award, and with BBC Radio and the leading creative-writing charity, First Story, to support the Young Writers' Award and the Student Critics' Award.

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Why do orphans appear so frequently in 19th-century fiction? Professor John Mullan reflects on the opportunities they provide for authors, considering some of the most famous examples of the period.

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Listen to the award-winning poetry of Roger Robinson

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Listen to the award-winning poetry of Roger Robinson

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Roger Robinson is a fervent, generous poet. His most recent collection, A Portable Paradise, won both the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2020 for a distinguished work evoking the spirit of a place – in this instance, post-Windrush Britain.

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Roger Robinson is a fervent, generous poet. His most recent collection, A Portable Paradise, won both the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s

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In need of writing inspiration? Want to know more about what makes a great short story? Not sure where to start? Get some ideas, strategies, tips and advice from top authors and the expert judges of the BBC Young Writers Award.

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BBC Radio 1 - Radio 1's Life Hacks - How to write a short story

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Useful writing resources for young writers and teachers.

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Explore the Waterstones Pride collection

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Explore the Waterstones Pride collection

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A parade of Waterstones' best LGBTQ+ books for Pride

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Explore what is on offer for young poets at the Poetry Society

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Explore what is on offer for young poets at the Poetry Society

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Competitions, poems by young writers and projects are all on offer for aspiring poets.

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We are committed to supporting poets at every stage of their career - many now established poets began taking part in our events and competitions as children, through teenage years and into adulthood. Our Young Poets Network, and events for emerging poets mean that you always have access to advice and company as you develop your craft.

Connect to the transformative power of poetry, including access to our Young Poets Network, subscription to Poetry News, poetry posters and more.
Join now

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We are committed to supporting poets at every stage of their career - many now established poets began taking part in our events and competitions as children, through teenage years and into adulthood. Our Young Poets Network, and events for emerging poets mean that you always have access to advice and company as you develop your craft.

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Read the Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day

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Read the Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day

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Read the poem of the day!

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Lipstick is one of the very finest elixirs

It has a soft consistency

Memory...

A note from the editor: Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, starring Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson, was released on this day in 1980. Dorothea Lasky's forthcoming book The Shining (Wave Books, 2023) writes through the rooms of the famous film's Overlook Hotel.

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Lipstick is one of the very finest elixirs It has a soft consistency Memory... A note from the editor: Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, starring Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson, was released on this day in 1980. Dorothea Lasky's forthcoming book The Shining (Wave Books, 2023) writes through the rooms of the famous film's Overlook Hotel.

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The Poetry Magazine Podcast features poets and artists in their natural form—reading poems and speaking freely.

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A Conversation with Justice Leah Ward Sears on Margaret Walker's "For My People"

of the reasons we have you on the podcast today is because you wrote a piece for the magazine about why you read poetry and what poems are important to you, in particular Margaret Walker's "For My People," which you talk about as a poem that you befriended a long time ago, and I love that verb that you use. Could you talk about how this poem has been a friend to you?

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something-something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.

Justice Leah Wards Sears talks about how Margaret Walker's poem "For My People" has been a resource for her throughout her life. Justice Sears's essay, "Love for My People," appears in the June 2020 issue of Poetry.

The editors go inside the pages of Poetry, talking to poets and critics, debating the issues, and sharing their poem selections with listeners.

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The Poetry Magazine Podcast | Poetry Foundation

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A Conversation with Justice Leah Ward Sears on Margaret Walker's "For My People" of the reasons we have you on the podcast today is because you wrote a piece for the magazine about why you read poetry and what poems are important to you, in particular Margaret Walker's "For My People," which you talk about as a poem that you befriended a long time ago, and I love that verb that you use.

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Dr Carol Atherton explores how Charlotte Brontë mixes fantasy with realism in Jane Eyre, making use of fairytale and myth and drawing on the imaginary worlds she and her siblings created as children.

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Fairytale and realism in Jane Eyre

Dr Carol Atherton explores how Charlotte Brontë mixes fantasy with realism in Jane Eyre, making use of fairytale and myth and drawing on the imaginary worlds she and her siblings created as children.

Professor John Bowen explains how Charlotte Brontë combines fairytale, Gothic techniques and realism to give Jane Eyre its unique power. Filmed at the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth.

Read transcript of this video

Jane Eyre is often seen as a profoundly realistic novel, drawing on Charlotte Brontë's own experiences to paint a vivid picture of Jane's suffering at Lowood and her struggle against the narrow role that 19th-century society allotted to women. Nevertheless, the novel also contains a strong element of fantasy. Right from the start - hidden in the window-seat, where she sits, 'cross-legged, like a Turk' - Jane escapes into a world of imagination, losing herself in the wild frozen landscapes of Bewick's History of British Birds, and thinking of the fairytales and ballads told by Bessie, the nurse, on winter evenings. Fantasy is thus established as a counterpoint to Jane's real-life privations, and as a rich source of imagery.

Bewick's The History of British Birds

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Extract from Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds (1797, 1804), showing one of the tiny illustrations Jane Eyre refers to as a child.

Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders

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William Henderson's Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England (1866) contextualises the fairy and folk references found in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Rochester

One important strand of fantasy in the novel surrounds Jane's relationship with Rochester, which is shot through with references to myth and fairytale. When Jane encounters Rochester's dog Pilot in Hay Lane, just before she meets Rochester himself, her first thought is of the 'Gytrash', a mythical black dog said to haunt the deserted roads of northern England. Rochester repeatedly refers to Jane as a 'sprite' and a 'fairy', and claims that she 'bewitched' his horse (ch. 13). The paintings that Jane shows to Rochester - of a cormorant perched on a desolate shipwreck, the goddess Selene rising into the sky above Mount Latmos, and a 'colossal head' wreathed in 'turban folds' - are straight out of fantasy, influenced by Brontë's knowledge of the Bible and of Greek mythology (ch.13). And the tale of the poor orphan who overcomes obstacles to marry a rich man can itself be seen as having its roots in fairytale, although what could appear as a simple rags-to-riches story is complicated by Rochester's references to himself as an 'ogre' (ch. 24), the fact that Jane is emphatically not a Beauty, and the troubling fact that in the fairytale canon, the most famous imprisoner of wives is, of course, the murderer Bluebeard.

The Brontës' childhood fantasies

If the realistic elements of Jane Eyre can be traced back to its author's childhood, then so can its more fantastical side. This has its roots in the 'web' of stories woven by the Brontë children. These began, famously, when the Revered Brontë brought home a box of soldiers from a trip to Leeds in 1826. Charlotte described this event in her idiosyncratic spelling in her 'History of the Year':

Emily and I jumped out of bed and I snat[c]hed up one and exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! When I said this Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole and perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave looking ferllow we called him Gravey. Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. he was called waiting Boy Branwell chose Bonaparte.

Professor John Bowen and Ann Dinsdale discuss the fantasy worlds of Gondal and Angria, created by the Brontë children, and the lasting influence of these on the sisters' later novels. Filmed at the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth.

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Brontë juvenilia: 'The History of the Young Men'

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Branwell Bronte's account of the toy soldiers from his 'The History of the Young Men', written in 1830.

These soldiers became the basis for the imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal that absorbed so much of the children's attention. Set in Africa and the South Pacific, and featuring a cast of characters based on contemporary political figures such as Wellington (Charlotte's hero) and Napoleon, and influenced by the writings of Byron and Scott, the Angria stories (created by Charlotte and Branwell) and their Gondal counterparts (the invention of Emily and Anne) were an early education in writing about political intrigue and tempestuous romance. Indeed, critics such as Christine Alexander have argued that they allowed their authors to explore emotions that had few other outlets. They were written up into tiny books and absorbed their authors well into adulthood, occupying a space in their imaginations that was in some ways even more vivid than reality.

As an adult, Charlotte struggled to detach herself from the world of Angria, which increasingly became the possession of Branwell. Nevertheless, many of the fantastical elements of Jane Eyre have their roots in Angria; and the character of Rochester - dark, complex and brooding - is a direct descendant of the Angrian hero the Duke of Zamorna. An awareness of fantasy is, therefore, essential to an understanding of both Jane Eyre and the imagination that shaped it, adding another dimension to a novel that is grounded so firmly in reality.

Brontë juvenilia: Tales

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'Is the Duke of Zamorna sane or insane?': from 'The Spell', a short story focussed on the Zamorna character and written by Charlotte Brontë as part of the Angrian saga. The Duke of Zamorna can be seen as a precedent for Rochester in Jane Eyre.

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Carol Atherton is Head of English at Spalding Grammar School in Lincolnshire. She has worked with a number of organisations, including NATE, the British Library, the Poetry Archive and the British Council, and was made a Fellow of the English Association in 2009. A specialist in literary theory and pedagogy, she has written widely on the teaching of English Literature, curricular reform and the nature of disciplinary knowledge.

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Fairytale and realism in Jane Eyre | The British Library

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Dr Carol Atherton explores how Charlotte Brontë mixes fantasy with realism in Jane Eyre, making use of fairytale and myth and drawing on the imaginary worlds she and her siblings created as children.

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