The inspiration and imagination of Charlotte Bronte.

It is often pointed out by Bronte biographers that the juvenile writings of the Bronte children were greatly influenced by romantic poets, especially the tremendously popular Lord Byron. The children had access to the literary magazines Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review and Fraser's.  One of the heroes of the magazines, Blackwood's in particular, is Lord Byron. The Bronte family also owned Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron, which Charlotte read and recommended to a friend (Barker 29). A brief overview of Byron’s work and its influence on Charlotte Bronte will be useful in understanding one of the many dynamics at work in Jane Eyre.

Bronte’s later juvenilia began to move her heroes deeper into the Byronic sphere. “Love and romance now became the dominant topic of Charlotte’s fiction” (Howe). Her character, the Duke of Wellington, was replaced by his son, who became a “figure of depravity and brutality.” The new character becomes obsessed with a rival character’s daughter, causing his wife a “death from a broken heart” (Hoeveler 21). In addition, her character Alexander Percy “is an obvious imitation of Byron’s Conrad; Charlotte even calls him a ‘Corsair’” (Elfenstein 131). It is often pointed out that Charlotte’s and her brother Branwell’s juvenilia are overly simplified, especially in regards to gender roles. Andrew Elfenstein specifies how: “Whereas Byron’s Turkish Tales flirted with the possibility that the inner self might belong to a woman as much as to a man, Charlotte’s and Branwell’s Byronic mode gave it exclusively to men” (131).  However, by the end of “The Corsair,” Byron, too, reserves the inner self for men alone. Elfenstein also reminds readers of Bronte Juvenilia that: “In Byron’s poems, gender relations are quite complex, but in the clichéd Byronism of Charlotte and Branwell they are simple: dominating men annihilate women” (133).

In Jane Eyre Bronte gives complexity to her characters, regardless of gender; at the same time she can be seen highlighting simplified Byronic gender roles. As an adult, however, Bronte relies on Byronic clichés in an effort to reform the “demonic lover,” and the societal customs that allow him to thrive. Bronte goes beyond Byron in Jane Eyre by going beyond “flirting with the possibility that the inner self might belong to a woman.” Instead, through the reformation of both hero and heroines, she decisively asserts that the inner self belongs equally to women and men, and in so doing is finally able to leave behind her childhood hero.   

The Byronic Woman

Byron

Byron selected poetry

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