Fielding (1707–54), novelist whose works are in the comic epic style.
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
1. attributed to me: Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were published in December 1847 as a three-volume set by T. C. Newby, who unscrupulously attempted to boost sales by fostering the rumour that they were all Currer Bell’s work.
CHAPTER I
1. moreen: Heavy fabric of wool, or wool and cotton.
2. Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’: This book, first printed in 1797 and in expanded form in 1804, was central to Charlotte Bront?’s childhood. The slightly misquoted passages are from p. xii of the introduction to Volume II (Water Birds). See her elegy for Thomas Bewick, ‘Lines on Bewick’ (1832), in Poems of CB.
3. ‘Where the Northern Ocean … Hebrides’: James Thomson (1700–48), ‘Autumn’, ll. 662–5, The Seasons, in Poems, ed. James Seabrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). These lines are quoted in Bewick, so that Jane’s experience in her recess is of a nest of framed literary and pictorial texts. Thule is an island fabled by the ancients, signifying ‘the end of the world, the last extremity’ (OED). Behind the Thomson passage, she will have recognized Milton’s vision of hell: ‘a frozen continent/Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms/ … The parching air/Burns frore, and cold performs th’effect of fire’, (PL, BK II, ll. 587–95).
4. the succeeding vignettes: Bewick concluded his entries with imaginative vignettes, without any given relation to the text.
5. ‘Pamela’ … ‘Henry, Earl of Moreland’: On Pamela, see Introduction, p. xxviii. John Wesley (1703–91) abridged and reprinted Henry Brooke’s novel of sentiment, The Fool of Quality (1765– 70), as Henry, Earl of Moreland: or, The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland, 2 vols. (London: Paramore, 1781). It became favourite reading in pious families.
6. Goldsmith’s ‘History of Rome’: Oliver Goldsmith’s (1730–74) Roman History (1769) was written in a pleasant and readable style and frequently reprinted.
7. the red-room: An implicit parallel between the red-room of Jane’s confinement (and her ensuing ‘fit’) and Bertha Rochester’s attic prison (and her madness) in Ch. XX forms a crux of modern feminist criticism, explored in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Princeton: Yale University Press, 2000) and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront? to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). The violent dynamic of crimson and white, intimating blood, erotic love and death, characterizes later significant domestic spaces. (See Ch. XI, note 16.)
CHAPTER II
1. the Abigail: Waiting woman, lady’s-maid.
2. cover: Deceit, underhandedness.
3. tabernacle: Originally the curtained tent containing the Jewish Ark of the Covenant but later used for an ornate, canopied structure, housing a tomb or shrine.
4. Marseilles: Stiff cotton, like piqué.
5. like a pale throne: The simile evokes the Throne of Judgement: ‘And I saw a great white throne … And I saw the dead’ (Revelation 20: 11–12).
6. a great looking-glass: Jane’s dissociation from her own image in the ‘visionary hollow’ of the mirror represents a meeting with her Doppelg?nger (her alter ego or double). Gilbert and Gubar note that ‘a mirror … is a sort of chamber, a mysterious enclosure’, where the child is ‘doubly imprisoned’ (Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 340–1). Compare Catherine Linton’s horror of her reflection in WH, p. 123: ‘“Don’t you see that face? … Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted! I’m afraid of being alone!”’
7. Why could I never please: This theme is presaged by Charlotte Bront?’s thinly veiled confessional account in a Brussels essay of 17 October 1843, entitled ‘Letter From a Poor Painter to a Great Lord’: ‘Throughout my early youth the difference that existed between myself and most of the people around me was, for me, an embarrassing enigma … I believed myself inferior to everyone, and it grieved me’ (Belgian Essays, p. 362).
8. twisted the necks of the pigeons: Charlotte Bront?’s disgust with the indulgence of boys’ cruelty to animals as an aspect of masculinity is a Bront? attitude inscribed in Anne Bront?’s Agnes Grey. Young Tom Bloomfield boasts of cutting up the birds he traps ‘“with my penknife; but the next, I mean to roast alive”’ (ed. Angeline Goreau (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 78). See also Emily Bront?’s WH, p. 122 and her Brussels essay ‘The Cat’ (Belgian Essays, p. 58).
9. his idea: The idea of him.
10. a light gleamed on the wall: In Charlotte Bront?’s ‘Tales of the Islanders’, Bk IV, ch. i, written at the age of thirteen, she introduces the motif of the disembodied moving light: