I'm Dr Alfie Bowne, and I'm a teacher of literature at the University of Manchester,

and I specialise in 19th century literature and culture.

Uh, and this is the first of two lectures I'll be providing for you on Jane Eyre,

one of the biggest and most important text in the 19th century.

Um, first of all,

I'm going to talk about Charlotte Bronte and introduce her

a little before discussing the main themes of the novel,

which are huge and various.

They include race, gender and class.

But what I'll be doing in the course of this lecture is trying to work

out how these three relate to each other

rather than treating them as separate themes.

And ultimately, I'm going to sort of provide an argument that the novel,

though interested in all of them, is really one that essentially about gender.

And it can really transform

some of the ways in which we think about gender.

Well, certainly the ways they thought about gender in the 19th century,

and even some of the ways in which we think about gender today.

So, first of all, Bronte herself a fascinating character.

Uh, as you probably know, one of three sisters, along with Emily and Anne Bronte,

who wrote all of them fantastic novels and lived very closely together.

They also had a brother much less well known, called Bramwell Bronte,

who was a sort of raving, alcoholic and bizarre artist who wrote Drew, sort of, uh,

very strange

pictures of a

of a demented man losing control. And he was a very stressful member of the family.

I may touch upon him a couple more times,

but born in 18 16, Charlotte Bronte was the third of six Children.

The other two lasted a very short time. Indeed,

in 18 20 the Brontes moved to Howard, which is very famous,

that you can go there and see the Bronte Village, which is fascinating

and huge. You know how it is all about.

The bronze is really, um, and her mother died just a year later in 18 21

and they were all sent to school. Cowan Bridge, which is

well,

the two schools they went to Cowan Bridge and Roe

Head School were pretty traumatic experiences for these girls.

And that's something that comes back in Jane Eyre with the treatment of the school

and how how appalling. That school is for Jane Eyre.

Charlotte was employed as a governess, then after that and became a teacher

and went to Brussels, which is another interesting chapter in her career,

where she sets the she sets in Belgium, the novel Villette,

which is another another worthwhile novel.

But,

uh, Charlotte and Emily returned home to how much after this

June in Brussels in 18 42 and set up their own school, Uh, Bronte

Bronte sisters or three of them were involved.

And so this shows they're kind of passion for education and youth,

their interest in childhood,

which is some of the one of the main things I'll be coming back to in this lecture.

Um,

in 18 46 they published their first poems, the Three Sisters Together,

but they published them under pseudonyms Kirra Ellis and Acton Bell.

And this was due to the gender politics at the time

because publications by women were not awarded as much success generally.

So they also anticipates the concern agenda which will come back in Jane Eyre.

They were obviously female writers with a sense of

how the rights women should have in those areas,

but they also acknowledged that they were living

in a time which didn't provide those.

In 18 47 A year later, Jane Eyre was published.

And in my second lecture on Jane,

I'm gonna make quite a lot of this time in the middle of the 19th century,

where biography and autobiography is really born in the way we know it today.

A year later, Bramwell died. Emily

died the same year

and died the next year.

So Charlotte Bronte has been through quite a lot by 18 49 18, 50.

And so Jane Eyre comes just before this traumatic period in her life,

which may be worth thinking about.

She then married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, who sort of by all means

saved her for a terrible

states.

And she died not long after that, just a year after that. Sadly, just at the age of 38

she had lived the longest of all the Bronte sisters.

Uh, so there's a bit of biography,

but I just want to say what we think of

when we talk about biography at the university here,

especially at the undergraduate level that were The biography is important and we

talk about biography and make connections between the author's life and the work.

One of the most important things is to be

aware of the limitations of the biographical approach.

And what we've got is the thing,

something that's been long abiding in literature

studies that we use the biography to explain

the text, and this can be quite dangerous.

And it's anticipated by very famous theorist Michel Fuko.

And he writes this.

We need to ask, What is the function of the author's name? What is an author's name?

How does it function?

What difficulties does it provide us with? And I think that's an important thing.

We don't want to explain things that happen in

Jane Eyre by reconciling them with Bronte's life.

I Bronte does this in the novel,

which shows or can be explained by this element of her life.

That would be to kind of reduce the text a bit,

and it was the text.

What I want to stress here is that the text does

many things that the author does not intend to do,

and this may anticipate what's what Freud means by the unconscious.

The text has conscious meanings and unconscious meanings,

and So whilst these meanings are affected by the biography,

I certainly wouldn't want to talk too much about authors intentions,

which I think can be quite a dangerous concept as it can. It can

lead to explaining

away things or not being aware of all the subtle meanings that are in

play in the text that the author may not have had complete control over.

So I hope that view will be that will be feeding into the rest of this lecture.

I will be talking about the biography,

but only as a sort of tension between biography and text.

I certainly won't be using one to explain the other.