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NOTICES OP BOOKS. 417
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
^».Reprints Hall. . B Mrs Y Ac . Graskel...
pletely before she wrote it , and so it was only when she afterwards saw it to withdraw the _thought that any erasure was
required . necessary She wrote by fits , and would sometimes come to a difficulty in her lot which stopped her progress for weeks . Those portions
purely p imaginary she thought over again and again , and dreamed about themuntil suddenly the method to be taken would rise clearly
before her . , " Jane Eyre , " we learn , originated from a dispute with her sisters , in which Charlotte upheld that the constant plan of
making heroines necessarily beautiful , was artistically and even morall . Her sisters maintained that a heroine could not be
made interesting y wrong without beauty , and so " Jane Eyre " was written to prove the contrary . This we receive on authority of a friend of
hers from her own lips . However this be , we may trace in Jane Eyre , as a character , many thoughts and feelings which belong
naturally and peculiarly to Charlotte Bronte . "We have no incongruithereas we have in the " Professor , " between the narrator
y , and the style and matter of narration . All the feeling's and sentiments are proper to Jane Eyre , and the general tone and spirit of
them come immediately from the heart of Charlotte Bronte . Both Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe -were most wisely chosen as fictitious
narrators , and it may be noted that in " Shirley " where there is no character of this class , the story is told not autobiographieally .
From Miss Bronte ' s letters on literary subjects , the broad plan on ¦ wh ich she wrote may be pretty accurately gathered . She acts up to
her views more strictly than most writers . She professes to follow truth and nature as her sole guides : truth and nature according to
her own real experiences , not as she fancies them to be , nor as she deduces them from the experiences of others . Her characters are
taken from the life , her incidents are mostly real , and these characters and incidents she modifies so that they work out easily and
naturally her fictitious plot . Thus the characters are not literal portraits , not daguerreotypes copying precisely form and feature , even when
they are most closely imitated from those whom she knew well . Some of them are mere sketches by the wayside as it were ; for
instance , Helstone in " Shirley , " whose prototype she saw but once , when she was ten years old : she was struck with him , and afterwards
when she was at Hoe Head heard him talked about ; some mentioned him with enthusiasm , others with detestation . I listened to
various anecdotes , balanced evidence against evidence , and drew an inference . ' * These characters again for the most part are placed , in
circumstances very different to those of the real persons . Having discovered by analysis what were the essential traits which
constituted the personality of her model , she could then deduce how these traits would be likely to work when placed under new and fictitious
influences . In her observance of life she proceeded by induction from effects up to first principles ; in her imaginative recreations she
deduced from the first principles so discovered effects which would follow
under certain conditions . When these conditions were little different
Notices Op Books. 417
NOTICES OP BOOKS . 417
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Feb. 1, 1860, page 417, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01021860/page/57/
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