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Episode 151 -- Jane Eyre (Patreon)

Published:
2026-09-03 01:34:41
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the genesis and long shadow of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), from the book's leery reception in its own day to its rediscovery as both a feminist text and as a possible site for a critique of certain strands of feminism.

Works cited in this episode:

Sandra Gilbert/Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is worth buying, but you can also find it here.

Gayatri Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) can be found here.

Comments

Laura Cullen

I do hate it (the novel, not the episode, which I'll almost certainly enjoy) but not as much as Wuthering Heights! Fucking Brontës, amirite? (ETA: I have re-read both as an adult, Jane Eyre specifically when I first taught AP Lit - at age 35- and the students had been assigned it as their summer reading by the previous teacher.)

Jamie Madden

1847... 1847... now why does that date sound familiar Ted?

Jemima Barkley

As a 23 yr old I really do have a lot of re reading planned for when that prefrontal cortex develops

ニコニコする

My English lit teacher for my IB just loved books about miserable people experiencing misery, and assigned us Wuthering Heights and Mayor of Casterbridge as summer reading. Let’s just say we did not have similar tastes and so rarely agreed on which books we liked.

MWD

I definitely thought high school English teachers were trying to make us hate reading because what else explained their choice of books that I could not remotely relate to in high school. I read all the time by the way.

Cheyenne Montgomery

This podcast has basically given me my reading list this summer. I read Withering heights after your episode (but didn’t make it past the first five minutes of the movie), Matrix after the lesbian nun episode, and I will probably read Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea next. Fun fact about comparing women to hyenas - the female hyenas are much larger than and very much dominant to males. Famously, they give birth through their giant phallic clitoris. Charlotte Brontë probably didn’t know that, so make of it what you will

Loraine

This is such a full circle moment for me. For it was during your Wuthering Heights episode, while fruitlessly waiting for the crazy woman in the attic to make an appearence, that I realized I had never actually read WH 🤡😭 But after your episode, I did and I was absolutely fascinated!

Olivia

I was SO excited when I saw this episode drop and it did not disappoint. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books of all time— it gets deeper and stranger with each reread.

Robin White

I am loving my 86 year old dad who gave me Jane Eyre at 16 and told me to NOT be an au pair in France :)

Jenny

Love this episode, and love a good post-colonial deconstruction of Victorian classics. Definitely going to read Wide Sargasso Sea! And perhaps to rewatch the TV show Black Sails (a similar deconstruction of Treasure Island and golden age of piracy lore)

Becky Robison

So I read Wide Sargasso Sea in a post colonial lit class BEFORE I read Jane Eyre. When I finally got around to Jane Eyre, I assumed I’d hate it. And I *loved* it. Really appreciated your nuanced discussion of it, because the novel is a lot more complex than people—and certainly its film adaptations—give it credit for. (Or even critique it for!)

Jackie

ICON

Kat

We love gothic novel szn 🖤📚🦇

J Gracie

I've yet to read the book, but I grew up watching the 1943 movie adaptation with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. There was a clip where the viewer can hear a woman (Bertha) shrieking in the night and it was terrrrifying. Unrelated...can we request episodes?? I just saw, and fell in love with, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and my dream is to hear Moira and Adrian talk about it.

CC

Rereading the books you got assigned in high school is so funny because what do you mean you assigned incoming high school seniors to read Crime and Punishment over summer vacation. I reread it a few years ago and now it’s one of my favorite books but man what were they thinking lmao.

Maxwell

Would adore an episode on Rebecca and du Maurier, tbh

James Talley

"Wide Sargasso Sea" has been an orphan phrase in my brain for decades, like the only reference I land on when I encounter the word Sargasso. I think I vaguely sensed it was a book or film. What a cool way to learn its origin story!

Kelsey

I haven't read Jane Eyre since I was FOURTEEN for high school and the book described here is so different from what I remember that I'll be rereading with anticipation soon!!!! Thank you!!!

Lisa Maruca

I thought your analysis of the anti-imperialism in Jane Eyre was spot on. It's interesting that she appropriates the rhetoric of slavery for herself when wishing to be free (maybe Spivak said that? It's been decades since I read her piece). Full emancipation of the enslaved in British territories came just 10 years before JE's publication so Brontë would have known it well. There's also lots of colorism in the novel. Good women (like Jane) are pale, bad women are dark (not just Bertha but also the ironically named Blanche, who is as "dark as a Spaniard"). The next book to read after The Wide Sargasso Sea is Marlon James' The Book of Night Women, which is a response to Rhys, focusing on the enslaved women on Jamaica. It's an often grueling and graphically violent but brilliant work.

Andrew Carlson

Thank you, professors, that’s helpful advice about rereading the classics as an adult. I’ve wondered this exact question. I so appreciate having a reading list with commentary!

Bea

I love that one, especially because Anne is my favourite Brontë lol. Beaton's whole Wuthering Heights series is great too.

Bea

Apologies for the multiple edits. Curse the Patreon mobile site

Bea

Please do some Anne next! Tenant of Wildfell Hall is such an underrated book.

Helen McCallum

My Jane Eyre story is reading it in 19th C novel class (luckily I didn't have to read Daniel Deronda) and a guy in my college being all "oooh Mr Darcy oooh". You will have to imagine him pretending to be a swooning romantic. He was generally a sniffy arse who thought he was smarter with me. Years later, YEARS, I got a message from him out of the blue. He'd taken his mum to see the film adaptation, and was like WHAT THE ACTUAL FCK I THOUGHT THIS WAS A ROMANCE. It took years but I was vindicated.

Ren

Moira, I was in true agony for the first few minutes of this episode thinking that you were going to crush my heart by talking for an hour about how much you hate one of my favorite novels. So I was SO relieved by the reveal that you loved it as an adult! I love this story of a weird, angry little girl who becomes a weird, angry little woman; who refuses to compromise on her integrity (her trueness to herself but also her slightly unconventional moral values); who turns down the life (with St. John) that society thinks she should leap at; and who still gets exactly what she wants in the end: safety, economic stability on her own terms, and a romance with a weird, angry little man who absolutely adores her. So I love Jane and Rochester and their freak4freak dynamic, I find them hilarious together, and while I would not like him if he was a real person, as a bi woman I do think it would be incredible to have someone understand and adore me the way that Rochester understands and adores Jane. I think it can be hard for people reading today, especially queer people (especially lesbians, Moira!) to not feel a lot of resentment that Jane's happy ending is kind of defined by her marriage to a man. I totally get that. But I think it's the result of both the time in which it was written and Charlotte's desperate craving for a man who would treat her as an equal. So I don't find it reductive at all in that sense. I think it's awesome that Jane marries Rochester, especially because it only happens after he's been humbled and she's been elevated. By the time they get married, they're on even ground (at least within the world of the novel) or she's even got more power than he is in a way that is very rare for female protagonists and their love interests. Now, of course there are a zillion morally problematic things about the book. The depiction of Bertha is really horrible (I love you, Bertha! You deserved better!), Rochester is humbled by becoming disabled which is gross, Jane has no real compassion for poor Adele, etc. But overall it's a book about a woman refusing to change herself and still getting what she wants. It's wish-fulfillment in that sense, but there's nothing fluffy about it. It knows just how dark life can be, which makes the happy ending feel earned in a way most subsequent romance novels in this vein simply don't feel to me. It's got banger gothic vibes, too. It's the perfect novel for girls and women who feel alienated from what society tells them they should be because they're weird and angry and above all unapologetically themselves. I lovelovelove this book, and I think your English teachers were giving you a huge compliment. (In the early 2000s, I had a pair of beloved high school English teachers who were in late middle age and had lived together for decades, and in retrospect they were absolutely lesbians who just weren't out because they taught at a Christian private school and also because it was 2001-2005. They were the coolest and the best.)

Ren

Also (because I can never say enough about my favorite story), I really adore the 2006 Susanna White adaptation starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stevens. Ruth Wilson is unconventional-looking enough that even though I think she's beautiful, it kind of makes sense for her to have been cast, and she's so good in it. Toby Stevens is a zillion times too hot for that character, but he's also the only one who's ever really embodied Rochester well, imo--he leans into the weirdness and also how absolutely delighted he is by Jane. It's also one of the rare adaptations of a classic women's novel that was actually written and adapted by women, and imo, it shows. To Walk Invisible, the tv film about the Bronte sisters by the great Sally Wainwright is also fantastic.

Ren

Have you read My Cousin Rachel? It’s my favorite du Maurier.

Astraea

I absolutely fell in love with Child Jane because she talks back to the adults in her life, and basically tells them they're being stupid when they are indeed being stupid. That was . . . a not insignificant part of my own childhood, although the negative consequences for me never rose to the level of "shipped off to a boarding school in the hopes that it kills you." I think it makes a huge difference that I first encountered the novel as an adult, not a teenager, and that it was presented to me as being in a similar category as Jane Austen's work: popularly perceived as "romance" for some reason when it is, in fact, clearly social commentary. I, too, loved that Jane keeps standing up for herself and choosing her self-respect and moral values over the things she "should" want. Being a rich man's mistress was a common and accepted path to financial security for a lot of women in this time (it came with certain types of social ostracism, but like . . . if mistresses are so unacceptable why does every rich man have one, hmm?). She could have taken that route. She could have stayed at Lowood as a teacher. She could have married St. John (thank god she didn't - Rochester is problematic but St. John Rivers always read as a straight-up controlling psychopath to me). Any one of those would have been a completely acceptable path, but she doesn't choose them because she doesn't want them. And things still work out for her! I also really, truly appreciate that even when we're in the height of Jane loving Rochester (before we find out about Bertha), she as a narrator keeps slipping in these little side comments about how this isn't going to work out well and isn't totally healthy. At one point she says something like, "I could not see God for his creation, of whom I had made an idol" (the "idol" being Rochester). Which like . . . I cannot tell you how much I would love to see this kind of critical analysis of "all-consuming love" in modern romance novels. It is FOR SURE not a kind of criticism we want to hear today!!

Astraea

I loved that adaptation! That was actually the first one I ever saw. I do also love the 2012 (?) adaptation with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska. Fassbender has a very different take on Rochester in that movie, but I think it still works - this notion that Jane is attracted to someone who actually is kind of dangerous. And not in a "oh he's dangerous but never to me" way but in an actual "no like he is a physical danger to you, girl, open your eyes!" And of course he ends up being essentially a social/financial danger to her as well, what with the attempted bigamy and all.

Astraea

One thing I really like about Jane Eyre is that Rochester ends up both penitent over his actions and also (arguably) actually punished for them. This is a thing that we almost never actually see in even modern-day ostensible romances, and Bronte was out here doing it in 1847. Some of that IS religious, I think - one of the manifestations of his repentance is that he essentially finds God - but some of it isn't. I know having your characters repent of their immoral behavior was a more standard part of 19th-century novels than 20th-century ones, so I don't want to pretend it's unique to this book. But, I have to say, having a problematic male love interest independently determine that his actions were wrong, and feel bad about them, and apologize, and also suffer some material consequences for them is like . . . fuckin' light-years ahead of your average modern romance or rom-com, where problematic behavior is usually waved away with "but he loooooves her" and *maybe* a half-assed apology, with no indication of actual behavioral changes.

Kat M

I think teachers (rightly) believe it’s the only window where some people will have the chance to be exposed to complex literature and be forced to read it, and they take it by the horns. Hamlet and Macbeth, death and the maiden, Funny Boy etc., formed my neural pathways. And, I think that’s pretty cool.

Charlotte

I love Tenant of Wildfell Hall! I will confess to liking it much better than all of the other Brontë novels, making Anne my favourite of the three.

Charlotte

Saaame! I love the comic, too, and Anne is also my fave.

Bea

Same! I think she was actually the best writer of the three, certainly the most revolutionary. IMO she's less well regarded because Charlotte prevented the republication of Wildfell Hall for so many years, then after her death it was released in a bowdlerised version. And that's still the most prevalent version available today. Plus Charlotte dissed her sister's writing in her forward to Agnes Grey. She said Wildfell Hall wasn't worth preserving and Anne was an inexperienced writer who'd forced herself to write it as a penance. ... I like Charlotte Bronte, but ruining her sister's rep for over a century because she didn't like her feminist novel is one of the worst things she ever did.

Charlotte

Before I listened to this episode, I had no idea Charlotte did that. She was wrong!

Lauren Weinberg

I love this book, but I'll never stop laughing at Jane's observation that (I'm paraphrasing) "a good English education corrected [Adèle's] French defects." Justice for Adele!

Kat M

I love that Moira was offended by being given Jane Eyre as a teen, but also relates to Brontë, who hated her job as a governess as she hated her job flipping burgers.

Ben Alpers

When I was in grad school (in history), Gayatri Spivak spent a year at my institution on a fellowship. I didn't get to know her well, but she was apparently a delightful person, though she was extraordinarily imposing. Everyone was initially scared to death of her. She was utterly no nonsense when it came to commenting on others' academic work. She was fair...but very tough. I remember going to a discussion of a paper on Christopher Columbus (it was 1992) by Lennard Davis, another very theory-heavy postmodern literary scholar. It was full of clever but, I felt, utterly empty wordplay. (The paper was circulated in advance before being discussed.) But I was a historian in training, so I sort of doubted my own reaction, as it was in a different field. So I was very relieved when, in the discussion of it, Spivak chided the author: "Lennard, this is the sort of stuff that gives bullshit a bad name." In the decades since, I've often envied that turn of phrase.

Jolanta Benal

I loved Jane Eyre when I was a girl and am somewhat mystified by all the hate! (Granting the problematic aspects of course. But still!)

Missouri Black & Pink Gazette

Can anyone share a source or interpretation about Annette being abused in Wide Sargasso Sea? I totally missed that in my first read of the book and then went back and missed it again lol.

Haydyn Davila

This is extemely off topics but Moira can you please do an episode about cultural feminism 🙏🙏🙏🙏

Rachel M

I'm laughing bc the book my English teachers chose to give me was the madwoman in the attic - compliment or no?

Adela

Another vote for cultural feminism episode please 🫶🏼