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Charlotte Bronte was a dutiful daughter of the Victorian age. Her best-known character, Jane Eyre, endures as a woman who transcends time and social order. How Charlotte released Jane into the world is the subject of Sheila Kohler’s new novel, “Becoming Jane Eyre.”
Charlotte Bronte was the third of a poor curate’s six children. Her childhood was marked by her mother’s death from cancer and two sisters’ deaths from neglect in a sinister boarding school. Her adult life was at times defined by the agony of waiting for responses to the explosive letters she sent to friends, a married man who had been her teacher, and her flirty publisher. Otherwise, most of her days were spent tending the needs of her restrictive father and a brother who drank himself to disgrace and then death.
Rather than recreate every deathbed scene and lover’s letdown, Kohler focuses on the seven years when Bronte and her remaining sisters, Emily and Anne, were writing in their father’s house, publishing their novels under pseudonyms and reacting to critics who considered their heroines “coarse.”
Kohler illuminates how Charlotte created a character who could act on the emotions she was forced to suppress. Jane says — loudly, brazenly — all the things Charlotte cannot say.
Charlotte’s imagination was the one place where she was not bound by decorum. Her unrequited love, her loneliness, the indignity of dependence, her rage at her inability to express herself openly — even to her father — all feed the story of a young governess who will not be overlooked.
“Becoming Jane Eyre,” rather than dwelling on a family’s tragedies, shows a spirit’s triumph.
Charlotte created a character who could act on the emotions she was forced to suppress. Jane says — loudly, brazenly — all the things Charlotte cannot say.