Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre

By Christine Alexander and Sarah L. Pearson

Charlotte Brontë filled her wildly successful novel Jane Eyre with people, places, and things from everyday life, anchoring the Gothic plot in what was 'real, cool, and solid'. Her reading audience of 1847 would have entered into a fictional world that felt comfortably familiar, populated by wealthy landowners, clergymen, teachers, governesses and servants; enacted in settings including recognisable Yorkshire landscapes and detailed architectural descriptions of manor houses, inns, villages,and cottages; furnished throughout with a host of objects ranging from exotic 'sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red' and 'Tyrian-dyed' curtains to burnt porridge and sewing needles.

Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre invites the twenty-first century reader into Charlotte's material world, both the world of the author and the world she created in her most famous novel. Providing detailed commentaries and lavishly illustrated with objects and images from the author's own life and times, this book explores Charlotte Brontë's accomplishment in imaginatively transforming her lived experience into a fictional masterpiece.