Episode 323: “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, Ch. 27-33

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This week on The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, we continue our series on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In today’s episode, they talk about the main plot points and follow threads of meaning in chapters 27-33. Some of the ideas they discuss include Romanticism in literature, Rochester’s Byronic qualities, pictures of Jane’s awakening, the eucatastrophe in this section of the book, parallels to the story of Cupid and Psyche, and more contrasts between fire and ice.

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Commonplace Quotes:

I am always suspicious of a novelist’s theories; I have never known them to be anything other than a justification for his own shortcomings. So a writer who has no gift for the contrivance of a plausible story will tell you that storytelling is the least important part of the novelist’s equipment, and if he is devoid of humor he will tell you that humor is the death of fiction.

W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer’s Notebook

Charlotte Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair. I should hesitate to say that Charlotte Brontë’s is a better book than Thackeray’s, but I think it might well be a maintained that it is a better story. All sorts of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot’s novels were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever have read them.

The truth is, I think, that the modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is the philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of that part of human existence which has always been the woman’s province, or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real difference between Tommy and Joe.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Victorian Age in Literature

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Easter Wings

by George Herbert

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
            Decaying more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                  O let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
      And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
      And still with sicknesses and shame.
            Thou didst so punish sinne,
                  That I became
                        Most thinne.
                        With thee
                  Let me combine,
            And feel thy victorie:
         For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

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