The secrets of Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s first attempt at writing a novel for publication, The Professor, was rejected by Smith, Elder & Co, but the publisher sent her a letter which she considered ‘discussed its merits and demerits so courteously… that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly expressed acceptance would have done. It was added that a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention.’

Charlotte was already working on another manuscript, and on 24 August 1847, only a month after the publisher had written, she posted Jane Eyre by rail from Keighley.

George Smith, the head of the firm, later recounted the e‘ffect the book had on him: ‘After breakfast on Sunday morning I took the MS of Jane Eyre to my little study, and began to read it. The story quickly took me captive… Presently the servant came to tell me that luncheon was ready; I asked him to bring me a sandwich and a glass of wine, and still went on with Jane Eyre.

‘Dinner came; for me the meal was a very hasty one, and before I went to bed that night I had  finished reading the manuscript.’

Smith accepted the book, o‘ffering Charlotte £100 for the copyright.

Jane Eyre appeared on 19 October 1847 and its sensational popularity marked a turning point in the fortunes of both author and publisher: Charlotte became one of the most acclaimed authors of her day, while George Smith went on to become one of the most successful publishers. Indeed, the fictional heroine has just been voted one of Britain’s most inspirational women.

In writing Jane Eyre, Charlotte drew on incidents from her own life, infused with elements of the supernatural and the fairytale. She interwove memories of places and houses she had known with her fictional creation, and recreated Cowan Bridge, the charitable school where she and her sisters had suffered 20 years before, as Lowood, the infamous school to which Jane is sent in the early chapters of the book.


The gripping story and charged language transport the reader from Lowood to Thornfield Hall, where Jane becomes governess to Mr Rochester’s ward. As the story unfolds, the descriptions of the hall take on a more sinister, Gothic aspect with resonances of Bluebeard’s castle, preparing us for the events that are to come. Jane and Rochester share a passionate nature but, as with all Byronic heroes, Rochester has a dark secret. On the morning that Jane is to marry him, she learns of his mad wife Bertha, kept under lock and key in the Thornfield attic.

The novel was instantly popular with the reading public and has sustained that popularity ever since. Reviews were favourable at first, but a Victorian novel that was outspoken in its treatment of religious and social injustice was sure to provoke a certain amount of critical comment.

In the following year, the sentiments expressed anonymously by Elizabeth Rigby in the Quarterly Review gained some currency.

Her view that the book was an ‘anti-Christian composition’ was taken up by other critics. ‘To say that Jane Eyre is positively immoral or anti-Christian, would be to do its writer an injustice,’ commented the Christian Remembrancer, but ‘still it wears a questionable aspect.’

It is difficult for modern readers to understand the shocked reactions of Jane Eyre’s first critics: Charlotte was a clergyman’s daughter and her heroine possesses a powerful moral sense of right and wrong. It is notable, however, that representatives of the established Church portrayed in Charlotte’s novels are described in terms of stone and chill, and are all, without exception, shown to be deeply flawed human beings.


One early critic went so far as to claim that Charlotte’s writing revealed ‘an intimate acquaintance with the worst parts of human nature’. Charlotte addressed some of her critics in the preface she wrote for the second edition of Jane Eyre. She also took the opportunity to dedicate the book to WM Thackeray, a novelist whose work she very much admired. She would surely have been delighted by his verdict on her work, for after having been sent a copy, Thackeray wrote to George Smith: ‘I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period. Who the author can be I can’t guess – if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a “classical” education… Some of the love passages made me cry – to the astonishment of John who came in with the coals… I don’t know why I tell you this but that I have been exceedingly moved and pleased by Jane Eyre.’

Another admirer of the book was GH Lewes, whom Charlotte had met on a visit to London. In his review for Fraser’s Magazine he wrote: ‘No such book has gladdened our eyes for a long while. Almost all that we require in a novelist she has: perception of character, and power of delineating it; picturesqueness; passion; and knowledge of life. The story is not only of singular interest, naturally evolved, unflagging to the last, but it fastens itself upon your attention, and will not leave you. The book closed, the enchantment continues.’

The Brontës At Haworth by Ann Dinsdale, with photographs by Simon Warner, is published by Frances Lincoln, priced £14.99. 

The real Thornfield Hall

It has generally been accepted that parts of Jane Eyre are set in the Derbyshire area, which Charlotte visited with her friend Ellen Nussey in 1845. One of the contenders for the original of Thornfield Hall is the romanticlooking North Lees Hall at Hathersage, a castellated manor house owned by the Eyre family. Ellen Nussey, however, believed that her own old home, Rydings, at Birstall, provided the inspiration for Thornfield.


Charlotte had first visited Rydings in 1832. Although the exterior of the house has been preserved, the environment has not. The ancient trees and bluebell woods have long since made way for the Leeds to Huddersfield road.

Erskine Stuart, writing in the late 1880s, was in a better position to see the house as Charlotte had known it. Although even at that time the mill chimneys were closing in, Stuart could still claim that Rydings ‘is a beautifully situated residence in the castellated style, standing on an eminence outside Birstall. In Charlotte Brontë’s wordpicture of Thornfield in Jane Eyre, we have the description of this building given to the life.’

The mad woman in the attic

The figure of the mad woman is rife in 19th-century fiction, for the Victorians were preoccupied by notions of insanity and the realms of excess. Uncontrolled passion was seen as leading to degeneracy and madness.

Charlotte would have been aware of several instances of mad women being confined within remote houses – one of them within her father’s parish. Joseph Greenwood of Springhead, on the outskirts of Haworth, was well known to the Brontës, and for several years his daughter was incarcerated in an upstairs room of the house. Conditions in asylums were notoriously inhumane in the earlier part of the 19th century, leading to many ‘lunatics’ being cared for at home, their existence kept as a shameful secret.

Further afield, it is also possible that during her time as governess to the Sidgwick family at Stone Gappe, Lothersdale, Charlotte visited Norton Conyers, a gloomy, atmospheric house near Ripon, which had its own legend of a mad woman imprisoned in the attic.

The review

‘We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and the thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’

Elizabeth Rigby’s unsigned review in the Quarterly Review, December 1848