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| John Pfordresher, photo by Corinn Weiler |
Q:
How did you come up with the idea for this book, and how did you research it?
A:
There’s a story here. I participated in a panel discussion about Jane Eyre for
the NPR syndicated radio program “The Diane Rehm Show” several years ago.
Subsequently
a young literary agent e-mailed me asking if I would be interested in writing a
book about how Brontë was able to write what she termed “my favorite novel.”
This
seemed to me an interesting project because I’ve been for many years fascinated
by the creative process, the “how” great writing emerges. So we wrote up a book
proposal and W. W. Norton generously accepted it.
The
answer to “how” seemed to me, insofar as it’s possible to scrutinize the
creative process, to be a biographical question.
And
so I learned all I could about Charlotte Brontë through the major biographies
from the classic account of Elizabeth Gaskell up to recent accounts by Winifred
Gérin, Juliet Barker, and Claire Harmon, as well as reading all of Brontë’s
letters and other writings, both the juvenilia as well as her other published
fiction.
I
soon discovered that Brontë was extremely secretive about this book, both the
writing of it and its relationship to her own life, and that this was one of
the motives for her choosing a pseudonym for the author’s name when the book
was published. Which leads to the next question…
Q:
How would you describe the relationship between Charlotte Bronte and her
fictional creation, Jane Eyre?
A:
Despite Brontë’s vigorous denials, there is a remarkably close relationship
between herself and her heroine. This was necessitated by her simultaneous wish
to make the novel as realistic as possible, and her acknowledgement that her
own life experience had been strictly limited.
In
pursuing the aim, as she wrote, of taking “Nature and Truth as my sole guides,”
she had necessarily to draw upon her own past life. She didn’t know much else.
My
book thus has been able to make a series of connections between what can be
known about Charlotte Brontë, both the things she observed and did, and also
the intensely vivid fantasy life which she had cultivated since early
adolescence, and the resulting novel.
Jane
Eyre, all of the evidence suggests, is a product of Brontë’s ability to
transform her past self into a strongly realized fictional heroine.
Q:
You describe the various men who influenced Bronte’s creation of Mr. Rochester.
What were some of the most important influences?
A:
Without a doubt the most important male influence in the creation of Mr.
Rochester was Brontë’s French teacher M. Constantin Georges Romain Heger, whom
she met in 1842.
Brontë’s
passionate love for him, balked by the fact that he was a married man, older
than she, and troubled when she began to express her feelings for him, drove
her first to write, upon her return to England, unwelcome letters to him, and
when he ceased replying, caused Brontë to transform him into aspects of the
first-person narrator and protagonist of her first novel The Professor, into
aspects of Mr. Rochester, and later and far more obviously into M. Paul Emanuel
in her final novel Villette.
All
three novels can be read as transformed versions of Charlotte’s silenced
love-letters, efforts to communicate through idealized fantasy with the man who
would not reply and who becomes the peculiarly attractive male protagonist in
her fictions.
I
found also very significant and interesting the powerful influence which her
father had upon Brontë and my book suggests that some of the crucial
characteristics of Mr. Rochester come from Patrick Brontë.
Q:
What accounts for the ongoing interest in Jane Eyre?
A:
In our time, it’s certain that what offended some Victorian readers about Jane
as protagonist has come to be strongly attractive.
Her
first-person female voice, a rarity at the time the novel appeared, presents
readers with a strong-willed woman vigorously asserting her right to be
herself, who is frank in attacking those who would denigrate and constrain her,
who is fiercely loyal to her chosen friends, who claims her own value despite
the fact that she has no money or social standing, is not attractive in any
stereotypical way – she is small, pale, and reserved, and who will face almost
any danger to insist upon living as she chooses.
Jane
is keenly aware of her sexuality, though she is reserved about this with
others, finds herself drawn to Mr. Rochester who is also strikingly different
from the pretty boys of the era, and the increasingly passionate relationship
between them is one of two independent spirits who discover a kinship in their
“souls” which is stronger than ordinary romantic attraction.
In
all of this Jane as a character speaks to modern readers as one of their own,
and so the novel enjoys if anything even greater popularity and esteem now than
it did when it first appeared as a run-away best seller in the fall of 1847.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I'm considering writing a second, similar book about Charles Dickens' Great
Expectations.
I'd
like to examine that remarkable writer's efforts to use, and yet at the same
time conceal some of the most painful memories of his youth, as well as the
love-affair he was secretly pursuing as he wrote the novel, and it will explore
the many different ways that, much as with his earlier first-person novel David
Copperfield, Dickens chose to expose in a very public way things about his past
which he otherwise assiduously concealed.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
An excerpt from my book my book on Jane Eyre will appear in the website LitHub
on the day of publication, 27 June. I’ll be presenting it and signing copies at
the Politics and Prose book shop in Washington, D.C., on July 6th, and at the
92nd Street “Y” on the 13th of July.
And
I will give a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution in the middle of October
on one or two aspects of the complicated relationship between Charlotte Brontë
and her equally extraordinary sister Emily.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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