Families Made and Families Found -- Then and Now
It all comes around to Jane Eyre, perhaps -- or to those lovely posters that I've been seeing in the train stations, of the beautiful young actress Mia Wasikowska as Jane, in the forthcoming movie. Prompting me to take a smart and lovely book off my shelf: Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres , by Ruth Brandon. Brandon writes eloquently about the embarrassments and discomforts of the governess life -- the loneliness of this particular state of upper servanthood, of being in the family but not of it, denied even the dow nstairs camaraderie and shared resentments of the servants' hall. The loneliness and the anger, expressed so passionately in Jane Eyre and lived by the real-life governesses, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Bronte, Claire Clairmont, and others. All of which, of course, takes place in the context of family life among the upper classes of a society where status and much of wealth was based upon the transfer of land, title and inheritance to an eldest so