dinsdag 8 september 2009

Jane Eyre

"My first aim will be to clean down (do you comprehend the full force of the expression?) -- to clean down Moor House from chamber to cellar; my next to rub it up with bees-wax, oil, and an indefinite number of cloths, till it glitters again; my third, to arrange every chair, table, bed, carpet, with mathematical precision; afterwards I shall go near to ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires in every room; and lastly, the two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnising of other culinary rites, as words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you. My purpose, in short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect state of readiness for Diana and Mary before next Thursday; and my ambition is to give them a beau-ideal of a welcome when they come."
~ Jane Eyre (ch. XXXIV), by Charlotte Brontë

Overgenomen van: http://bronteblog.blogspot.com/

By the mid-19th century, women such as Charlotte Brontë could also self-diagnose a disease that in its symptoms was perhaps close to what we would today call depression. [...]
Charlotte Bronte: Author
Brontë claimed to have suffered a fit of hypochondria while teaching at Roe Head, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, aged 19. She fell into "a most dreadful doom", which she believed had little to do with the sickly and doomed family milieu in which she lived. Rather, Brontë meant by "hypochondria" a dismal combination of sorrow, worry and resignation that arose, so she thought, from the fact that she now had no time to write or to think. Later, in 'Jane Eyre', she had Rochester accuse Jane of hypochondria when she expressed her fears about their planned wedding. In real life Brontë outlived her five siblings.

Bertha Mason. Overgenomen van: http://bronteblog.blogspot.com/

“Charlotte Brontë’s portrait of Bertha Mason, the ‘mad, bad and embruted’ wife of Rochester in Jane Eyre has taken on iconic value. But by the time Brontë penned it, she was drawing on what were already old images of madness, probably garnered from the notorious Bedlam”. Lisa Appignanesi

Lisa Appignanesi will be talking about her latest book MAD, BAD and SAD: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800. Including writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, this is the history of the study of the female mind over the past two centuries. The book has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, the Warwick, the MIND and has won the Medical Journalist’s Award.

Lisa Appignanesi is a novelist, writer and broadcaster, she is former deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, chair of the Freud Museum and president of English PEN.