Jane Eyre 2: the Brontes' real lives are even wilder than their fiction

Secret Life of Books

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When Charlotte Bronte arrived in Brussels at the age of 26 to attend finishing school, she had no idea she would fall desperately in love with the director: Constantine Heger.

Heger - a strange, mercurial character - would prove the model for Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. On returning to Haworth Parsonage, she wrote obsessively to and about him, while her plans to open a school floundered and her brother Branwell sunk deeper into addiction. Determined that her life should not be a failure, she gathered the best poems by herself and her sisters for publication under male pseudonyms.

The idea for Jane Eyre came at an intense low in her life, but once started, it poured out within a year. At the start of 1847, her life was a failure, by the end of it she was famous.

Join Sophie and Jonty as they look at how Charlotte Bronte turned her vulnerabilities into great art and created one of the most unusual and improbable love affairs in fiction.

Recommended reading: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Deborah Lutz (Norton, 2016); Claire Harman, Charlotte Bronte: A Life (Viking, 2015); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic (Yale University Press, new edition 2000); Christine Alexander, ed., Oxford Companion to the Brontes, (Oxford UP, 2006).

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