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Jane is only pretending to be a heroine of romance or fairytale. She may act out the Gothic role of ‘woman in peril' for a while at Thornfield Hall, when she is menaced by her lover's first wife, but, when things become intolerable, she leaves. She might be trapped by her desires, but she is never trapped by her circumstances. She is, in terms of social and literary history, not a romance figure at all but a precursor of the rootless urban intelligentsia who, seventy years later, will take the fictional form of the Brangwen sisters in D. H. Lawrence's
Women in Love
. Like the Brangwen sisters, and like Lucy Snowe in
Villette
, Jane Eyre must earn her living by teaching. There is no other ‘respectable' option, except writing fiction, and, since Jane is a character in a piece of fiction, she would give the game away if she resorted to that. When Jane sets out on her journey to her new place of employment, she says things that no woman in fiction has ever said before:

It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to
feel itself quite alone in the world; cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens the sensation, the glow of pride warms it: but then the throb of fear disturbs it.

Independence is not a piece of cake. But, for Jane, it is essential. It isn't surprising to find her saying

Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people the earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.

The history of Charlotte Brontë and her family has itself been the subject of much fiction and speculation, as if it, too, were the stuff of legend. Certainly, the six Brontë children seem to have tried hard to be ordinary, but could not help making a hash of it. The Reverend Patrick Brontë, their father, may have passed his life as the ‘perpetual curate' of Haworth Parsonage, near Keighley, in Yorkshire, but he early exhibited that discontent with the everyday that marked out the clan when he celebrated his arrival in England from his native Ireland by changing his spelling from Brunty. (The umlaut is a master stroke.) Of all of them, he repressed the discontent the best, which may be why he lived the longest, outliving his last surviving child, Charlotte, by six years, to die at the age of eighty-four in 1861; Charlotte died in 1855, at thirty-nine years old.

From childhood, the Brontë children knew there were no such things as happy endings. Cancer claimed Mrs Maria Brontë in 1821, when Charlotte was five. The two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died at the school Charlotte Brontë barely fictionalised in
Jane Eyre
as Lowood. (Charlotte claimed Maria as the prototype of Jane's unnaturally self-abnegating friend, Helen Burns.)

Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, the only boy, and Anne lived to grow up. The family home at Haworth was close to both the
majestic landscape of the Yorkshire moors but also to the newly built, sombre milltowns surrounding Leeds; their life was not as isolated as might be supposed. They read voraciously and extremely widely. Their father does not appear to have censored their reading at all.

From an early age, they amused themselves by writing stories and poems. After a failed attempt to set up a school following the period Charlotte and Emily spent in Brussels in 1842, studying French, Charlotte persuaded her sisters to publish an anthology of their poetry under the sexually indeterminate names, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte wrote that they ‘did not like to declare ourselves women because . . . we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice'. That's an elegant piece of irony, especially since there have been persistent attempts to attribute not only
Wuthering Heights
, Emily Brontë's great novel, to the authorship of Branwell Brontë, but also virtually the entire
oeuvre
of all the other sisters too. Branwell, in fact, possessed little literary talent but, alone of them, exhibited signs of a genuine talent for physical excess that might have passed unnoticed at the time of
Tom Jones
but dissipated itself in drink and scandal at Haworth Parsonage.

Jane Eyre
was published under the name of Currer Bell in 1847 and was an immediate and smashing success. It was followed, successfully, by
Shirley
in 1849 but Charlotte Brontë can have taken little pleasure in her growing fame; Branwell, Emily, and Anne all died of tuberculosis between September 1848 and May 1849. The unusually closely knit and self-sufficient family was gone. Charlotte and her father lived on together. In 1853, she published
Villette
, one of the most Balzakian of English novels, a neurotic romance that uses fantastic and grotesque effects sparingly to heighten an emotionally exacerbated realism in a most striking way. In 1854, Charlotte Brontë finally ceased to rebuff the advances of her father's curates, who had been proposing to her in relays all her adult life, and married the most persistent, the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, in 1854. Less than a year later, she was dead, possibly from tuberculosis, possibly from complications of pregnancy.

Few lives have been more unrelievedly tragic. It is salutory to discover that her novels, for all their stormy emotionalism, their troubling atmosphere of psycho-drama, their sense of a life lived
on the edge of the nerves, are also full of fun, and of a wonderfully sensuous response to landscape, music, painting, and to the small, domestic pleasures of a warm fire, hot tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread.

There is also a spirit of defiance always at large. It is an oddly alarmed defiance; Charlotte Brontë's frail yet indomitable heroines burn with injustice, then collapse with nervous exhaustion after they have passionately made their point. All the same, Matthew Arnold put his finger on it when he expostulated that her mind ‘contains nothing but hunger, and rebellion, and rage'. As orphaned children, as Englishwomen abroad, as wandering beggars, as governesses, as lovers, Charlotte Brontë's heroines do not know their place. They suffer from a cosmic insecurity that starts in the nursery. Their childhoods are full of pain.

The first relation with the family, the elementary institution of authority, is often distorted or displaced. After the infant Jane suffers a kind of fit, or seizure, while being punished by her Aunt Reed, the local apothecary is sent for: ‘I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew there was a stranger in the room.'

Aunt Reed's husband, who might have protected her, is dead. Jane's own father is long dead. When she is befriended by the Rivers family, they are freshly in mourning for their father.
Jane Eyre
is a novel full of dead fathers. As if to pre-empt the possibility of his own demise, Mr Rochester himself staunchly denies paternity – he refuses to accept little Adèle Varens, daughter of a former mistress, as his own child, causing Jane to cry out protectively: ‘Adèle is not answerable for either her mother's faults or yours: I have a regard for her, and now that I know that she is, in a sense, parentless – forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir – I shall cling closer to her than before.'

The question of whether Rochester actually
is
Adèle's father is left interestingly moot. But something curious happens at the end of the novel. After Rochester has been blinded and maimed, we are left with the image of himself and Jane, a grizzled, ageing, blind man, lead by the hand by a young girl (Jane is young enough to be his daughter). Suddenly, astonishingly, they look like Oedipus and Antigone, having ascended to the very highest level of mythic resonance. (Charlotte hastily restores the sight in one of his eyes before the first child of the union is born, and that
is an interesting thing for her to do, too.) Jane has transformed Rochester into a father. Her mediation lets him live.

Jane Eyre
begins, magnificently, with a clarion call for the rights of children. Jane, at ten years old, squares up to her Aunt Reed, who has signally failed to care for the orphaned child left in her charge.

‘I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.'

No child in fiction ever stood up for itself like that before. Burning with injustice, the infant Jane, true child of the romantic period, demands love as a right: ‘You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness: but I cannot live so.'

Indeed, she specifies love as a precondition of existence. And not love in a vacuum, love as a selfless, unreciprocated devotion, either. There isn't a trace of selfless devotion anywhere in
Jane Eyre
, unless it is the selfless devotion of the missionary, St John Rivers, to himself. After all, it is very easy to love, and may be done in private without inconveniencing the object of one's affections in the least; that is the way that plain, clever parson's daughters are supposed to do it, anyway. But Jane
wants to be loved
, as if, without reciprocity, love can't exist. This is why, towards the end of the novel, she will reject St John Rivers' proposal of marriage although he has half-mesmerised her into subservience to him. She rejects him because he doesn't love her. It is as simple as that.

It is also exhilarating, almost endearing, to note that, in spite of the sentimental pietism which Charlotte Brontë falls back on almost as a form of self-defence against her genuinely transgressive impulses, she can also – see the entire treatment of Blanche Ingrams, Jane's alleged rival for Mr Rochester's affections – be something of a bitch.

Although the sober,
The Professor
, published posthumously in 1857, was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed, it is
Jane Eyre
that exhibits all the profligate imagination we associate
with youth. However much it may have been written with a bitter ambition for fame foremost in the author's mind, the novel remains firmly rooted in the furious dreams of a passionate young woman whose life never quite matched up to her own capacity for experience. It is the author's unfulfilled desire that makes
Jane Eyre
so haunting.

The writing that the Brontë children had engaged in since childhood was of a very particular kind. They spent their adolescence constructing together a comprehensive alternative to the post-romantic world of steam engine and mill chimney they were doomed to inhabit. Charlotte and Branwell chronicled a territory they named Angria; Anne and Emily constructed the history of the island of Gondal. This alternative universe, ‘with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish', just like the encyclopedic other-world in Borges' marvellous story, ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', was so intensely imagined that sometimes its landscapes and inhabitants pushed aside the real ones that surrounded their creators:

Never shall I, Charlotte Brontë, forget . . . how distinctly I, sitting in the school-room at Roe-head, saw the Duke of Zamorna . . . his black horse turned loose grazing among the heather, the moonlight so mild and exquisitely tranquil, sleeping upon that vast and vacant road . . . I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest which undulated as the plume of a hearse waves to the wind . . .
¹

At nineteen, Charlotte Brontë had lost her heart to a creature of her own invention, the irresistibly seductive, sexually generous Duke of Zamorna, a Byronic
homme fatal
untouched by irony. It is easy to say that real life never could have lived up to this, that Charlotte Brontë's wonderfully discontented art comes out of a kind of Bovaryism, a bookish virgin's yearning for a kind of significance that experience rarely, if ever, provides. Jane Eyre, before her discontent is made glorious summer by the charismatic Rochester, who himself bears some resemblance to the Duke of Zamorna, often allows herself to ‘open my inward ear to a tale
that was never ended – a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired, and had not in my actual existence'.

But Charlotte Brontë
did
possess a sophistication, a temperament, that could, perhaps, be equalled by her immediate family, but by precious few other Englishmen and women of the period. Thackeray, whom she admired, patronised her. ‘The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature!' he said, as if passion was, by rights, the perquisite only of those blessed with conventional good looks. But Europe was full of artists exhibiting the same temperament as Charlotte Brontë – Berlioz, Delacroix, De Musset. Charlotte Brontë herself admired George Sand. Yet she went to Brussels to study French, not Paris, and her Protestantism, which can amount to fanaticism, springs into operation as soon as she arrives in a Catholic country, as if to protect herself from
giving herself away
. Charlotte Brontë's fiction inhabits the space between passion and repression. She knows she must not have the thing she wants; she also knows it will be restored to her in her dreams.

What would have happened if Charlotte Brontë really had met Byron? Although I doubt a spark would have flared between those two; Claire Clairmont and Lady Caroline Lamb had taught Byron to steer clear of women of passion. But Shelley, now . . .

Byron and Shelley were dead and gone by the time Charlotte Brontë was growing up in those dour, Northern school-rooms. Yet those James Deans of the romantic period burned their images of beauty, genius, and freedom on the minds of more than a generation. If the Byronic hero contributed in no small measure to the character of Edward Fairfax de Rochester, the man whom Jane habitually, in masochistic ecstasy, calls ‘my master', he also contributed towards the ambitions of the young woman who invented Rochester.