a teacher, Charlotte Bront? had disliked most of her pupils: ‘if those Girls knew how I loathe their company they would not seek mine as much as they do’, she wrote at Roe Head in 1836 (as quoted in Barker, p. 255).
3. bright visions … existence: Charlotte Bront? refers to the conflict between her Angrian fantasy saga and her duties as a teacher: ‘The thought came over me am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? … Then came on me rushing impetuously all the mighty phantasm … I should be agonized if I had not the dream to repose on, its existence, its forms its scenes to fill a little of the craving vacancy’ (as transcribed in Barker, pp. 254–6).
4. political rebellions: The threatening tone of this manifesto, placing women’s rebellious feelings within the larger context of social unease in 1840s Britain, affronted conservative reviewers: ‘Every page burns with moral Jacobinism’ (Christian Remembrancer, April 1848, CA, Vol. III, p. 18); ‘a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man … ungodly discontent’ (Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre’, December 1848, Quarterly Review, CA, Vol. III, p. 51).
5. Grace Poole’s laugh: This demoniac laugh is heard after Jane’s tumult of fantasy and discontent: Gilbert and Gubar read this laugh as ‘a bitter refrain’ to Jane’s imaginative tales and her yearning for a fuller life (Madwoman in the Attic, p. 349).
6. ‘Revenez … Jeannette’: Come back soon, my good friend, my dear Miss Jeannie.
7. metallic clatter: The vividly realized approach of the rider may owe something to Charlotte Bront?’s daydream of Zamorna in her Roe Head journal (1835): ‘I now heard the far clatter of hoofs on the hard & milk-white road … Never shall I Charlotte Bront? forget … how distinctly I sitting in the schoolroom at Roe-head saw the Duke of Zamorna … the moonlight so mild & so exquisitely tranquil … I was quite gone … I felt myself breathing quick & short’ (‘We Wove a Web in Childhood’, Juvenilia, p. 268).
8. Gytrash … pretercanine: Spectral creature of ill omen; its ‘mask’ being the head or muzzle and its ‘pretercanine’ quality suggesting intelligence beyond the merely canine. The phrase was doubtless garnered from the spooky stories in such journals as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, e.g. ‘The Spectral Dog – An Illusion’, November 1830, p. 785.
9. halted: Limped.
10. sympathy … antipathetic: The concept of natural sympathies and antipathies which underpins the relationships in Jane Eyre owes much to Romantic poetry, mesmerism and Romantic chemistry. Patrick Bront? owned a copy of Humphrey Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), in which the chemical system of natural affinity and disaffinity is laid down. For Davy, organic life participated in the same system of innate attraction and repulsion.
11. ‘Like heath … away’: Quotation from Thomas Moore’s ‘Fallen is thy Throne, oh Israel!’ (ll. 19–20) from his Sacred Songs (1816); behind the ballad is an Old Testament curse: ‘Cursed be the man that trusteth in man … For he shall be like the heath in the desert’ (Jeremiah 17: 5–6).
12. ‘too easy chair’: Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Bk IV, l. 342: ‘Stretch’d on the rack of a too easy chair’ (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, London: Methuen, 1968).
CHAPTER XIII
1. prenomens: Forenames.
2. ‘Et cela … mademoiselle’: And that must mean, … that there will be a present for me in there, and perhaps for you too, miss. Monsieur has talked about you: he asked me the name of my governess, and whether she wasn’t a small person, quite thin and rather pale. I said yes: for it’s true, isn’t it, miss?
3. Rhine: Heidelberg is actually on the River Neckar, not the Rhine.
4. piecing … scattering: The manuscript has ‘piecening’, a term in colloquial use in northern mill towns, from the activities of ‘pieceners’, or child employees of a spinning-mill, who joined the ends of threads which broke while being spun or wound. The loom-like motion between ‘piecening’ and ‘scattering’ of Jane’s busy eyes on the fire suggests the novel’s dialectic of unity and disintegration.
5. ‘N’est-ce pas … coffre’: There’s a present for Miss, isn’t there, sir, in your little chest?
6. consoles and chiffonnières: A console was a small table, against a wall, and a chiffonier a small cupboard whose top was