How Charlotte Brontë came to write “Jane Eyre”

The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë Wrote Her Masterpiece. By John Pfordresher. W.W. Norton; 254 pages; $26.95; £20.

CRITICS relish a bit of detective work. Four hundred years after William Shakespeare died, people still offer new theories about the true identity of the “Dark Lady” and the “Fair Youth” of his sonnets. Journalists have been dogged in their attempts to discover the writer behind the pseudonym “Elena Ferrante”.

Charlotte Brontë has been the subject of many such investigations. During her lifetime, the pen name “Currer Bell” provoked wild speculations; reviewers variously concluded that the author was a man, a woman, or a mixed-sex writing duo. Readers past and present have wondered how a shy curate’s daughter from Yorkshire came to write “Jane Eyre”, a finely wrought tale of passion and darkness, when her life contained seemingly little of either. With “The Secret History of Jane Eyre”, John Pfordresher, a professor at Georgetown University, seeks to provide some answers. His aim is to unearth the real-life people and events that inspired Brontë’s much-loved classic novel.

Unfortunately, Mr Pfordresher cannot illuminate the writing process itself, save for noting the date that Brontë first put pen to paper. She left “no outlines, notes about characters, drafts scribbled over with revisions and additions” or any other such tantalising clues. So Mr Pfordresher chooses to follow the chronology of the novel and weave in the biographical detail.

John Reed, Jane Eyre’s young adversary, is based on Charlotte’s experience of the boys she met during her time in Belgium, as well as the unpleasant sons of the Sidgwick family (for whom she served as a governess) and a character in “Agnes Grey”, her sister Anne’s novel. Jane’s time at the dreadful Lowood Institution is reconstructed from Charlotte’s grim memories of Cowan Bridge school, only made less “exquisitely painful” (tracts were published defending the school and its proprietors). The virtuous and stoical Helen Burns is a reincarnation of Maria, the sister who died at 11; Emily and Anne are also present as Diana and Mary Rivers. So extensive is the biographical framework on which Charlotte built, Mr Pfordresher argues, that readers should view “Jane Eyre” as autobiography rather than a work of fiction.

Yet when it comes to the inspiration for Mr Rochester and Bertha Mason, two of the most compelling figures in English literature, Mr Pfordresher stumbles. His argument that Charlotte drew on her father Patrick’s demanding presence, fiery temper and “sexual energy” for Mr Rochester is unconvincing: Patrick’s attempts to remarry after his wife’s death seem more to do with caring for his six children than with lust. The claim that Bertha’s lunacy was based on Charlotte’s trip to North Lees Hall—where the mistress of the house “reputedly went mad, was confined in a padded room, and died in a fire”—is a fair one. But Branwell, the author’s miscreant brother, is an equally good candidate that Mr Pfordresher ignores. In her biography of Charlotte, Claire Harman points out that he kept the household awake at night “with his noisy despairing” over a past lover and is rumoured to have set his own bed on fire.

The verisimilitude of Brontë’s novel has long been one of its greatest strengths (The Economist, reviewing it in 1847, argued that it was “perfectly fresh and lifelike” and, as such, “far removed from the namby pamby stuff of which fashionable novels are made”). Though this “secret history” illuminates much of the real-life mould that shaped the novel, it at times confuses autobiographical elements with autobiography. In its determination that Charlotte Brontë is Jane Eyre, many of the comparisons between true incidents and those of the fiction feel forced. Literary sleuthing is often illuminating—but it can also see clues where none really exist.