The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë Wrote Her Masterpiece

by John Pfordresher

Overview

The surprising hidden history behind Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Why did Charlotte Brontë go to such great lengths on the publication of her acclaimed, best-selling novel, Jane Eyre, to conceal its authorship from her family, close friends, and the press? In The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher tells the enthralling story of Brontë’s compulsion to write her masterpiece and why she then turned around and vehemently disavowed it.

Few people know how quickly Brontë composed Jane Eyre. Nor do many know that she wrote it during a devastating and anxious period in her life. Thwarted in her passionate, secret, and forbidden love for a married man, she found herself living in a home suddenly imperiled by the fact that her father, a minister, the sole support of the family, was on the brink of blindness. After his hasty operation, as she nursed him in an isolated apartment kept dark to help him heal his eyes, Brontë began writing Jane Eyre, an invigorating romance that, despite her own fears and sorrows, gives voice to a powerfully rebellious and ultimately optimistic woman’s spirit.

The Secret History of Jane Eyre expands our understanding of both Jane Eyre and the inner life of its notoriously private author. Pfordresher connects the people Brontë knew and the events she lived to the characters and story in the novel, and he explores how her fecund imagination used her inner life to shape one of the world’s most popular novels.

By aligning his insights into Brontë’s life with the timeless characters, harrowing plot, and forbidden romance of Jane Eyre, Pfordresher reveals the remarkable parallels between one of literature’s most beloved heroines and her passionate creator, and arrives at a new understanding of Brontë’s brilliant, immersive genius.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393248876
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Pfordresher is a professor of English at Georgetown University. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

1 Secret History 19

2 The Red-Room 33

3 Injustice 52

4 The First Girl 73

5 A Situation 87

6 The Master 103

7 Cord of Communion 130

8 The Fury 155

9 Desolation 172

10 Perfect Congeniality 184

11 An Independent Woman 204

Epilogue 215

Acknowledgments 225

Notes 227

Index 243

Editorial Reviews

02/20/2017
Pfordresher (Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination), an English professor at Georgetown University, suggests that Charlotte Brontë’s beloved novel Jane Eyre draws its deep emotional power from the way she refashioned her own losses and frustrations into her heroine’s triumph. This book is a narrative of that transformation, essentially a biography of Brontë as told through the events of her novel. Pfordresher makes his way with anecdotal ease through his subject’s life, generously acknowledging his debt to previous biographies, letter collections, and Brontë’s juvenilia. He doesn’t quite resolve a paradox of Jane Eyre: Brontë claimed she was not her heroine, but the novel was titled “an autobiography,” and she insisted on its truth. The psychologizing, speculation, and parallel-hunting are interesting and occasionally haunting; for example, Pfordresher finds Brontë’s dead sisters in the character of Jane’s best friend, Helen Burns. But the biographical interpretation occasionally confuses the writer with her creation and ultimately limits the novel to a wishful righting of Brontë’s childhood torments, unhappy work as a governess, and painful, unrequited passion for Constantin Heger. Fans of the novel will enjoy this behind-the-scenes investigation into Jane Eyre and the imagination of its author, but the parallels it produces aren’t enough on their own to explain the enduring fascination of Brontë’s work. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"“[Pfordresher’s] direct and assessable arguments…uncover surprising parallels between Charlotte’s life…and her creation…Revelatory analysis."

British Heritage

"This is an engaging introduction to Charlotte and her famous novel, which will whet the appetite of anyone who is coming to either of them for the first time."

The Sunday Times - Lucasta Miller

"Pfordresher…uses [Jane Eyre] as a kind of treasure map…[The Secret History of Jane Eyre] is a fascinating and authoritative book, written with intelligence, wit and affection, and full of surprises. Reader, I recommend it."

BookPage - Deborah Mason

"[Pfordresher] knows…how to add his own penetrating insight to this perceptive, respectful portrait."

The Washington Times - Martin Rubin

"Pfordresher matches the events of Brontë's life with those of her heroine step by step, showing where they overlap and where they meaningfully diverge."

John Williams

"A wildly readable introduction to [Jane Eyre] and [Charlotte Brontë]."

Wall Street Journal - Elizabeth Lowry

05/01/2017
In this book, Pfordresher (English, Georgetown Univ.; Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination) raises many points about English novelist Charlotte Brontë's (1816&55) childhood, her family life, and her role as an author that will be familiar to her fans. He breathes new life into these biographical elements by using them to tease out an ongoing tension between the "twin sources of her remarkable achievement": her experiences and her imagination. Pfordresher suggests that the latter saved Brontë (and the fictional Jane Eyre). He also explores overlaps between her lived experiences and her heroine's story. Some of the details (such as Brontë's father's struggle with his eyesight) add new depths to passages in the 1847 novel. Overall, Pfordresher reveals that Jane Eyre is not reducible to Brontë's experiences, just as Brontë herself is much more than the author of the novel. VERDICT While not exactly an academic biography, this book will be a great addition to public libraries and prove interesting for readers curious about Brontë's social world. [See Prepub Alert, 1/9/17; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17, p. 24.]—Emily Bowles, Appleton, WI

Library Journal

2017-03-21
Everyone knows Jane Eyre is an autobiographical novel, but where does roman end and à clef begin?Few books feed reality hunger more than Charlotte Brontë's 19th-century masterpiece, whose deeply observant narrator speaks in such a direct voice that she seems to bear witness to lived events. As Pfordresher (English/Georgetown Univ.; Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination: An Illustrated Journey, 2008, etc.) argues, that's because it is the work of an author who only wrote what she knew. Accepting Brontë's assertion that she never described any "feeling, on any subject, public or private," that wasn't genuine, he adroitly follows the paper trail of her letters to demonstrate that the novel draws from both actual events and deeply repressed emotions. He finds a lot of Brontë both in Jane and in Rochester's mad wife; both author and character "lived on the borderline of madness, and there are moments of anguish when its darkness takes over." As previous biographers have long noted, the horrible experience of the Brontë sisters at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge was closely duplicated in Lowood Institution in the novel; the parallels were so close and obvious it even caused a minor scandal. Pfordresher is more interesting when the relation between fact and fiction is less obvious, such as in the creation of Jane's classic love interest, Rochester. While the clearest real-life source appears to be a married professor whom Brontë could never have, Pfordresher sees evidence also in her doomed brother Branwell, as well as literary models such as Lord Byron's Giaour and John Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost. There's a certain literal-mindedness to Pfordresher's approach, however, and his insistence that everything in the book has traceable real-life coordinates isn't always convincing. Does Jane flee Rochester because Brontë was in some overwrought emotional state or because the story simply demanded this change of pace? On the whole, a helpful guide to the book as a Rorschach blot of a singular Romantic temperament.

Kirkus Reviews