Virginia Woolf in Brontë country: picking apart the genius in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a challenge to the imagination – even the great modernist didn’t find it easy. It’s fascinating to read about the difficulties and delights she encountered

Last week, I wrote about the imaginative stretch required of readers tackling Jane Eyre two centuries on from its publication. Since then – last week, that is – I’ve been comparing notes with Virginia Woolf. It turns out that she – about a century nearer to Charlotte Brontë than we are – was not feeling readily intimate with this fictional world either.

Writing in the Common Reader in 1916, Woolf also wrote of the mental knots we have to twist ourselves in in order to understand Charlotte Brontë:

When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.

A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious.

We read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry.

‘Wicked and cruel boy!’ I said. ‘You are like a murderer – you are like a slave-driver – you are like the Roman emperors!’

I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

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