am better than you: This recalls the child Jane’s defiance of the Reed children in Ch. IV: ‘They are not fit to associate with me’ and of Mrs Reed: ‘You think I have no feelings … you are bad’.
12. away – away –: Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale, ll. 31, 80.
13. Come to my side: Another reference to the Genesis myth that Eve was created from Adam’s ‘side’: in other words, come ‘home’ and be ‘flesh of my flesh’.
14. horse-chestnut … split away: The storm and the cloven tree represent those ‘signs’ noted by the older Jane at the beginning of Ch. XXI. Ellen Nussey remembered that Charlotte Bront? was impressed by the ‘iron-garthed’ chestnut at her home, Rydings, which ‘having been split by storms’ was ‘still flourishing in great majesty’ (Reminiscences (1871), CA, Vol. I, p. 107).
CHAPTER XXIV
1. mustard-seed: Mustardseed is one of Titania’s fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In ‘We wove a web in Childhood’, Charlotte Bront? had compared the childhood dream-world to a biblical mustard-plant which, originating in a tiny seed, becomes ‘a mighty tree’ (‘Retrospection’, Poems of CB, l. 30).
2. pour … lap: Jove appeared to the maiden Dana? as a shower of gold.
3. hoof … foot: If Jane is a ‘sylph’, Rochester is a satyr, a libidinally over-endowed hybrid male and beast, a follower of Bacchus.
4. six months … husband’s ardour: Charlotte Bront? had expressed the jaundiced view that passion was ‘likely to last the honeymoon’ on the husband’s side and that if a woman nursed passion for her spouse, ‘God help her, if she’s left to love passionately and alone’ (Letter of 15 May 1840; Letters, Vol. I, p. 218).
5. Hercules … Samson: The classical and biblical emblems respectively of the virile man enslaved to his sexuality: Hercules was bought as a slave by Omphale, Queen of Lydia. Samson in the book of Judges betrayed a sacred riddle to his wife, the woman of Timnath, and surrendered the secret of his strength to the Philistine woman, Delilah (Judges 13–16).
6. ‘gild refined gold’: Shakespeare, King John, IV. ii. 11.
7. Ahasuerus: Rejecting his wife, Vashti, the Persian King Ahasuerus made the poor Jewish girl Esther her successor; she pleaded for the liberation of the Jews (Esther 7). This reference stands in contrast to Charlotte Bront?’s unthinkingly anti-Semitic attitude to the modern ‘Jew-usurer’.
8. ‘a blue-piled thunderloft’: Charlotte Bront? was intrigued by this phrase in Thomas Aird’s ‘The Demoniac’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XXVIII (1830), p. 813. Given the fictional date of events, Jane could not actually have read this.
9. unction to my soul: Allusion to Hamlet, III. iv. 147–9: ‘Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, / That not your trespass but my madness speaks.’ The subsequent lines are significant in drawing attention to the hiding of corruption: ‘It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, / Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen’ (ll. 150–2).
10. qu’elle … confortable: How bad that would be for her – how uncomfortable.
11. un vrai menteur … en avait: un vrai menteur: A real liar; contes de fée: fairy tales; du reste … en avait: besides there are no fairies and, even if there were …
12. parterre: Ornamental flower border.
13. second Danae: See note 2 above.
14. failed not to execute: Thus, in her wish for independence, Jane sets in train the events that will bring about the exposure of Rochester’s existing marriage and her own tragic suffering.
15. Grand Turk’s … houri forms: The seraglio was the Sultan of Turkey’s harem. The gazelle, a species of antelope, is noted for its delicate form and the softness of its eyes; hence, this kind of beauty denotes submissiveness; houri forms: endowed with the shapely forms of the women in the Moslem Paradise.
16. Stamboul: Istanbul.
17. three-tailed bashaw: Turkish ‘pasha’, distinguished by his battle-standard of three horsetails.
18. private marriage ceremony: Spouses could make a special legal financial agreement concerning rights to property, under Law of Statute.
19. eat … ghoul: Reference to the Bluebeard fairy tale which underlies the novel.
20. ‘pour … contenance’: To restore my composure.
21. ‘Yes … tyne’: Robert Burns, ‘The Bonnie Wee Thing’ (1791): ‘Bonnie wee thing, cannie wee thing, / Lovely wee thing, wert thou mine, / I wad wear thee in my bosom, / Lest my jewel it should tine’ (The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, ed. John Fawside, London: Bliss, Sands & Foster, 1894). The song expresses the lover’s fear of loss of the beloved, who is understood to be of tiny stature.
22. ‘The truest