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Grade8/9 Essays on The Relationship between Jane & Rochester

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Grade8/9 Essays on The Relationship between Jane & Rochester

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Presentation of Men in JE - Revision Pack

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Does Bronte use an active or passive voice

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Does Bronte use an active or passive voice

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The Active Voice, the Passive Voice, and Zombies

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6 sample Jane Eyre GCSE extract questions

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Quizlet is a lightning fast way to learn vocabulary.

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A Fantastic Article: Reader, I shagged him

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A Fantastic Article: Reader, I shagged him

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Reader, it's Jane Eyre - Crash Course Literature 207

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For fun: EMILY Bronte Vs Jane Austen debate. #TeamBronte

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Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë: The Queens of English Literature Debate with Dominic West

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Bertha & Jane attack patriarchy & marriage

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The Lives of the Brontes

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West Yorkshire Country Walk Haworth Bronte Country Top Withins

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Brontë Country: The Story of Emily, Charlotte & Anne Brontë

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Brontë Country tells a fascinating tale full of passion, romance and tragedy, giving the viewer a real flavour of life in Victorian Britain as well as a delightful perspective into the lives, loves and works of the world famous Brontë sisters; Charlotte, Emily & Anne.

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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 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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Great Guardian Article

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It's daunting to write about Jane Eyre 200 years after Charlotte Brontë's birth. It's not just that so many people have read and loved (and, yes, also hated) this book. It's also the difficulty of understanding that Jane's intimate, confiding voice may not speak to us as directly as we may think.

Among Brontë's many talents is an ability to make you feel that you are seeing the world just as her narrator does. There's the cosy way she draws us into the story with that direct address to "you", the "reader" whom she invites constantly to see what she sees. We fancy we are also seeing a room in the George Inn at Millcote, visible to us "by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling", straining to see the exact same scene under the same flickering light as Jane. But it isn't just what Jane sees that matters: Brontë also takes us deep into her head and, seemingly, her soul. Even when she says, "Gentle reader, you may never feel what I then felt!" we think otherwise. Her "stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears" seem real, her "agonised prayers" honestly accounted, her "dread" clear and comprehensible.

Reading Group contributor RabBurnout puts it neatly: "The thing is, of course, to read the book oneself, and experience it viscerally - it is definitely a book that the reader forms a powerful personal response to, I think."

I got to the end of the novel feeling as if I had shared something with Jane - that her experience was mixed into mine and that I had felt as she had felt. So it was confounding to reflect again and realise that, of course, I hadn't fully understood her. It wasn't just that she is an unreliable narrator, often concealing her own feelings from herself and her reader; often claiming that black is white, that St John is an admirable, good man, that she's calm and unflustered when Rochester knows her heart is beating like a steam piston. It's also that there is much about Jane's (and by extension, Charlotte Brontë's) world that I don't comprehend and for which I can't feel much sympathy.

The most obvious sticking point is religion. There was a fascinating discussion on last week's Reading Group thread about how hard it is for us to gauge Jane's sincerity when it comes to her Christian faith, particularly her attitude to her cousin St John's missionary zeal. Is there part of her that remains the proud "pagan" and rebel she declares herself to be in the early pages? Does she say one thing and mean another when she professes her desire to be subservient to Christian ideals? Is her abiding love for Rochester something she maintains in spite of (and in opposition to) the Church's teachings on marriage - or is there a more complex set of relationships and internal conflicts going on? Does the mean, religious Brocklehurst express a deep truth about men of faith? Or is he more simply a bad apple? Is it possible for us, who've been lucky enough to have grown up in a largely secular society, to feel the deep currents of faith and propriety that sway Jane?

That last question prompts another: who are we to judge? Would Jane Eyre (or Brontë) think much of my disregard for Christian feeling? Would she think much of the accompanying implication that we live in a better, more sophisticated age?

How would it feel to argue with either woman about such things? I can imagine Jane Eyre opening up a pretty fizzy can of whoop-ass (most of us wouldn't present much challenge after Mr Rochester, after all). But I'm being fanciful - if I've gone too far, it's a mark of how real Jane seems and how much life we can imagine for her outside the book.

I'm also keen to imagine meeting Brontë on her own terms. We in the present have a tendency to patronise those in the past. It's easy to think we are more sophisticated because we now know more about - say - the early history of Christianity. Or because Brontë is, of course, ignorant of modern feminist theory, or poststructuralism. We can bring readings to her work that she couldn't begin to imagine.

But she could easily turn the tables on us: in 1847, Brontë was a gateway to the future (as the fact that we are reading her today so neatly proves). She lived in a sophisticated and complicated world, one whose codes and unwritten rules, whose morality and intellectual structure, would baffle even the most learned among us.

It's also worth remembering that Brontë would be an unusual case in any age. She was a writer of perception, intelligence and stylistic genius. But she was also an oddball: curiously old-fashioned - with her borrowing of gothic horror tropes and her smouldering Byronic leading man - Brontë was also unusually forward-thinking in her depiction of the plight of governesses and insistence that intelligent women's work had value. Crucially, she was an outsider, cut off from the main literary circuit in Haworth, far from the great metropolis where titans such as William Thackeray and Charles Dickens held sway. Indeed, she had once regarded London as a place of unimaginable danger and vice. When Brontë's friend Ellen Nussey visited the city in 1834, Charlotte even wrote a letter to her afterwards, expressing her astonishment that Ellen had returned "unchanged".

She was a writer of perception and stylistic genius, but she was also an oddball

Even more telling is Brontë's relationship with Thackeray. She was sharp enough to understand his genius, even dedicating the second edition of Jane Eyre to him because of her rich appreciation for Vanity Fair. Unfortunately, she was also distant enough from literary gossip to not know that Thackeray had hidden his wife away in an asylum (not the ideal recipient for a book about a mad woman in an attic). Their meetings were also tinged with confusion: Charlotte was initially said to be dumbstruck when she met her idol - and confused when he started talking about the scent of cigars, not realising he was making a flattering reference to the scene in chapter XXIII where the smell of Mr Rochester's cigar sets Jane aflutter.

Similar misunderstandings abounded when he organised a party in Brontë's honour, in 1849. The trouble this time was that she refused to acknowledge she was Currer Bell (the pseudonym she'd used on the early publication of Jane Eyre) and would only give sharp, short answers. ("I do and I don't," she snapped, when other guests tried to ascertain if she liked London society women.) Thackeray eventually sneaked out of his own party to go to his club.

Anne, Thackeray's daughter, later recalled: "This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating ... We all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm; for, genius as she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow ... And everyone waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all." It's reassuring at least to know that Brontë's contemporaries were just as able as we are to patronise her - and to feel that curious mix of intimate understanding and baffled difference.
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Reading Jane Eyre: can we truly understand Charlotte Brontë or her heroine today?

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It's daunting to write about Jane Eyre 200 years after Charlotte Brontë's birth. It's not just that so many people have read and loved (and, yes, also hated) this book. It's also the difficulty of understanding that Jane's intimate, confiding voice may not speak to us as directly as we may think.

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1149 quotes from Jane Eyre: 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.'

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Articles on Jane Eyre ( Comparing with Pride & Prejudice yuck!)

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Articles on Jane Eyre ( Comparing with Pride & Prejudice yuck!)

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, first published in 1847.

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Professor John Bowen and Ann Dinsdale discuss the poor sanitary conditions in Haworth in the 19th century and the mix of rural and industrial influences on the Brontë sisters and their writing. Filmed at the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth. Explore more films, together with thousands of Victorian and Romantic literary treasures, at the British Library's Discovering Literature website - http://www.bl.uk/discovering-literature.

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Ann Dinsdale explains why Jane Eyre shocked Victorian readers.

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Jane Eyre: The Role of Women in Victorian Society.

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Jane Eyre: The Role of Women in Victorian Society.

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Fuscovery

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Professor John Bowen explores the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, revealing the depths of her character and the context in which Charlotte Brontë created her. Filmed at the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth. Explore more films, together with thousands of Victorian and Romantic literary treasures, at the British Library's Discovering Literature website - http://www.bl.uk/discovering-literature.