Welcome to the third in the series of Read It Ribbit's Monthly Cheat Sheets. This month, we've condensed Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre so you'll have an idea what's happening in the Fukunaga adaptation which apparently screws with the plot's timeline. See, book blogs can involve poular culture!
Cheat Sheet 3: Jane Eyre
Title (s): Jane Eyre
Author Charlotte Brontë. Originally published under pseudonym Currer Bell.
Who’s Who?
Jane Eyre: The original plain Jane. An orphan brought up by her unfeeling aunt and sent to a cold and often harsh boarding school, Jane uses her intelligence and wit to rise above a potentially damning situation to gain a respectful position as a governess. Jane clings to her morals and her pride in a mostly degenerate world.
Mr (Edward) Rochester: The archetypal leach, Rochester is knocking on the door of middle age but has no problem at all playing mind games with a twenty something without a friend in the world who would be destitute without her job. He acts on impulse with very little care or thought for the consequences of his actions, which leads to many problems later on. Expects his servants to shoulder the burden of his past mistakes.
St John Rivers: Not worth noting except his existence inadvertently explains the mystery of the popular colonial name of Sinjin (for some reason, you pronounce it weirdly). Sinjin is a boring pastor who makes eyes at Jane when she stumbles upon his house after fleeing Thornfield and is taking in by him and his sisters, Mary and Diana.
Bertha Rochester nee Mason: The original mad woman in the attic. Pyromaniac Bertha is probably the most un –PC character within the novel. Much maligned by her husband who locks her away with a carer (
Grace Poole) in the Thornfield attics upon discovering she suffers from mental illness. Her brother,
Mr Mason, also appears.
Adele Varens: A young French girl who Jane acts as governess to and is the ward of Mr Rochester. Rochester had an affair with her dancer mother Celine several years ago and agreed to act her protector when Celine was dying. It is unknown even to Rochester whether or not he is Adele’s father.
The Reeds: Jane’s cruel relatives with whom she spends her early childhood. After the death of her kindly uncle Reed, the cruelty of her Aunt and her cousins propels her to Lowood school.
What happens then?
The young orphan Jane suffers at the hands of her relatives, the Reed’s , after her uncle's death and is shipped off to Lowood boarding school. Initially a place of great cruelty and hardship, she looses her best friend Helen to consumption but finds kindness and inspiration from her teacher Maria Temple and follows in her footsteps to teach at Lowood for a further two years after completing her own studies.
Wanting a change of scenery, she answers an advert for position as a governess at
Thornfield Hall. When Jane eventually encounters the lord of the manor, Mr Rochester, her world turns upside down as the old leach decides to play a game of cat and mouse with her. Blowing hot and cold and dangling nubile young ladies called Blanche in front of poor plain Jane, she is thrown into despair as she realises the only man who has ever paid her any attention is much more likely to fall for a pretty young thing with the right sort of connections over a penniless servant. Rochester’s mind games continue as he dresses up as an old gypsy woman (yep you read that right) and tells her fortune, dropping massive elephant-in-the-room hints to the reader that he’s actually interested in Jane.
After some too-ing and fro-ing where the pair get closer (including a strange midnight encounter where Rochester asks her to help his mysteriously injured friend Mr Mason) Jane is forced to leave Thornfield when she finds out that her cousin has died and that her aunt Reed is gravely ill. She returns to her family home to bury the hatchet with her surviving cousins and try and smooth things over with the old bag. Before the old bag finally pops her clogs, she gives Jane a three year old letter from another uncle, John Eyre, who it seems was rich and wanted to adopt Jane and give her all his money but the evil old cow didn’t forward the message out of spite so all this time Jane has been none the wiser. (This plot point would never happen these days, what with email and phones, twitter and the legions of determined, kamikaze Harry Potter owls which will get the message to you no matter what in the manner of the
Milk Tray Man).
Jane eventually goes back to work where Rochester rips out her heart by telling her he’s marrying Blanche, just after she declares her home is where he is but haha it’s only a joke and he proposes to Jane instead. She says yes, but, unsurprisingly starts getting anxious about it all and strange things like her veil being torn in half don’t help matters. Come the day of wedding and the part where the priest asks if there’s any reason that they shouldn’t get married and Mr Mason re-appears and pipes up that Rochester is married to his sister Bertha. Shock/horror!
In a typically unapologetic outburst, Rochester insists on bringing everyone back to the Thornfield attics to meet Bertha, who’s busy scurrying around, and declares that as she’s mad, he thought no one would mind him becoming a bigamist because he’s suffered enough and marrying Jane would make everything alright…. Hmmmmm. The next day, Rochester suggests that they run away to France and live in sin because he’s not really married as he was ‘tricked’ into marrying a mad woman by his own father for money: a suggestion which, to the staunchly principled Jane with nothing but her honour, is simply not on.
Unsurprisingly, Jane leaves Thornfield and her beloved Rochester behind, wandering the moors until she collapses and is rescued by Sinjin and taken in by the Rivers’. After recuperating, Jane begins to teach in a small village school and before long, it is revealed that she is the sole heir to John Eyre’s fortune and also that she is Sinjin and his sisters’ cousin (and feeling generous, she splits her £20,000 inheritance with her new found family). Sinjin asks her to marry him and become a missionary with him in India. Jane thinks she can hear Rochester calling for her from far away and begins travelling back to Thornfield at the first opportunity, escaping the clammy clutches of Sinjin in the process.
She returns to Thornfield to find the house in ashes after being burnt down by Bertha, who threw herself off the roof during the blaze. She goes in search of Rochester, who was badly injured in the fire, loosing both a hand and his sight. They make up, he proposes and she accepts now that he is free to marry. They live happily ever after, and Rochester even regains his sight enough to see their first born child, awww.
Is there a Film Version?
Funny you should ask… If you have missed the many television adaptations (including the rather enjoyable
BBC adaptation with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens who managed the impossible and made Rochester a sympathetic character) there’s a
brand new adaptation in cinemas now so you to can see how plain the makeup and hair department has made a pretty actressjust by gviing her an unflattering hairdo and minimal concealer.
Things the Fans Say
Random Facts
- Charlotte ‘outed’ her sisters and herself as female, much to Emily’s dismay, when she publicly claimed her work which she had submitted under the male pseudonym Currer Bell. Before that time, the Brontë sisters ahd been writing under their pseudonyms as the Bell brothers.
- Charlotte wrote to and received a reply from the then Poet Laureate Robert Southey about his views on women who wrote: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.’ Have you ever heard of him? Miss Brontë, I believe you have been vindicated.
Other Things
- Jane Eyre also has a much loved and much read prequel which focus on Bertha’s life before Jane meets her. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys has also been critically acclaimed and is often studied in tandem with Jane Eyre.
EDIT 4TH NOVEMBER 2011:
ReaditRibbit has moved! Check out the new blog
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