Review by New York Times Review
At the University of New Hampshire in the 1970s, John Pfordresher was teaching "Wuthering Heights" when he confessed to his students that he hadn't read "Jane Eyre." "One of them," Pfordresher told me, "in a voice heavy with chastisement, informed me that I'd better read Charlotte Bronte's novel soon. I did, with astonishment." Four decades later, Pfordresher, now an English professor at Georgetown University, has published "The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Bronte Wrote Her Masterpiece." Pfordresher matches the events of Bronte's life with those of her heroine step by step, showing where they overlap and where they meaningfully diverge. According to him, Bronte's "painful and devastating" yearlong experience at Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge served as the inspiration for her portrayal of Lowood Institution, the school for orphans in the novel. But since Jane had a rougher early childhood than Bronte, the author's experience at school would have been even "more terrifying, more overwhelming, more meaningless" than Jane's. Pfordresher goes on to analyze how Bronte drew upon her emotional ties with five men (two of them fictional) to conjure the passionate connection between Jane and Mr. Rochester. These ties included her "early adolescent love for and rivalry with" her brother Barnwell, which led to a "short, nearsighted, skinny, red-haired kid" being part of the inspiration for Jane's formidable love interest. Pfordresher writes: "While she insisted that her invented protagonist had little relationship to her own life, in fact, just about everything that the novel reveals about Jane comes from Charlotte's experience." I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable and we don't really care.' - LAWRENCE OSBORNE, AUTHOR OF 'BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS,' IN AN INTERVIEW WITH NPR
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
What gives Jane Eyre its power? Although Charlotte Brontë denied that there were similarities between Jane Eyre's life and her own, Pfordresher (Georgetown University) maintains that the novel is, in fact, richly autobiographical. And if the autobiography is that of a dutiful and unassuming young woman, it also reflects an intense inner life roiling with passion, longing, and rebellion. Pfordresher shows how, in writing Jane Eyre, Charlotte drew on both her own experiences and the extravagant fantasies concocted by her and her siblings. For the character of Rochester, he finds models in five men, three of them Patrick Brontë, Charlotte's father; Branwell, her beloved but dissolute brother; and M. Héger, the married man with whom she fell in love in Brussels real; and two of them fictional creations. Other chapters examine the kinship between Jane (and Charlotte, by extension) and Bertha Mason, Rochester's mad wife, and how Moor House, where Jane ends up after she flees from Rochester, offers an idyllic re-creation of life at Haworth parsonage. Readers who know and love Jane Eyre will be intrigued by this thought-provoking analysis.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pfordresher (Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination), an English professor at Georgetown University, suggests that Charlotte Brontë's beloved novel Jane Eyre draws its deep emotional power from the way she refashioned her own losses and frustrations into her heroine's triumph. This book is a narrative of that transformation, essentially a biography of Brontë as told through the events of her novel. Pfordresher makes his way with anecdotal ease through his subject's life, generously acknowledging his debt to previous biographies, letter collections, and Brontë's juvenilia. He doesn't quite resolve a paradox of Jane Eyre: Brontë claimed she was not her heroine, but the novel was titled "an autobiography," and she insisted on its truth. The psychologizing, speculation, and parallel-hunting are interesting and occasionally haunting; for example, Pfordresher finds Brontë's dead sisters in the character of Jane's best friend, Helen Burns. But the biographical interpretation occasionally confuses the writer with her creation and ultimately limits the novel to a wishful righting of Brontë's childhood torments, unhappy work as a governess, and painful, unrequited passion for Constantin Heger. Fans of the novel will enjoy this behind-the-scenes investigation into Jane Eyre and the imagination of its author, but the parallels it produces aren't enough on their own to explain the enduring fascination of Brontë's work. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this book, Pfordresher (English, Georgetown Univ.; Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination) raises many points about English novelist Charlotte Brontë's (1816-55) childhood, her family life, and her role as an author that will be familiar to her fans. He breathes new life into these biographical elements by using them to tease out an ongoing tension between the "twin sources of her remarkable achievement": her experiences and her imagination. -Pfordresher suggests that the latter saved Brontë (and the fictional Jane Eyre). He also explores overlaps between her lived experiences and her heroine's story. Some of the details (such as Brontë's father's struggle with his eyesight) add new depths to passages in the 1847 novel. Overall, Pfordresher reveals that Jane Eyre is not reducible to Brontë's experiences, just as Brontë herself is much more than the author of the novel. VERDICT While not exactly an academic biography, this book will be a great addition to public libraries and prove interesting for readers curious about Brontë's social world. [See Prepub Alert, 1/9/17; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17, p. 24.]-Emily Bowles, Appleton, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Everyone knows Jane Eyre is an autobiographical novel, but where does roman end and clef begin?Few books feed reality hunger more than Charlotte Bront's 19th-century masterpiece, whose deeply observant narrator speaks in such a direct voice that she seems to bear witness to lived events. As Pfordresher (English/Georgetown Univ.; Jesus and the Emergence of a Catholic Imagination: An Illustrated Journey, 2008, etc.) argues, that's because it is the work of an author who only wrote what she knew. Accepting Bront's assertion that she never described any "feeling, on any subject, public or private," that wasn't genuine, he adroitly follows the paper trail of her letters to demonstrate that the novel draws from both actual events and deeply repressed emotions. He finds a lot of Bront both in Jane and in Rochester's mad wife; both author and character "lived on the borderline of madness, and there are moments of anguish when its darkness takes over." As previous biographers have long noted, the horrible experience of the Bront sisters at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge was closely duplicated in Lowood Institution in the novel; the parallels were so close and obvious it even caused a minor scandal. Pfordresher is more interesting when the relation between fact and fiction is less obvious, such as in the creation of Jane's classic love interest, Rochester. While the clearest real-life source appears to be a married professor whom Bront could never have, Pfordresher sees evidence also in her doomed brother Branwell, as well as literary models such as Lord Byron's Giaour and John Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost. There's a certain literal-mindedness to Pfordresher's approach, however, and his insistence that everything in the book has traceable real-life coordinates isn't always convincing. Does Jane flee Rochester because Bront was in some overwrought emotional state or because the story simply demanded this change of pace? On the whole, a helpful guide to the book as a Rorschach blot of a singular Romantic temperament. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
