The story of Jane Eyre (1847) is so well known it has become iconic. Charlotte Brontë’s most famous character has inspired a wealth of criticism, interpretation, and re-interpretation, most famously by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which provides a prequel to the story so that the most marginalised character is given a voice. But what if Jane Eyre had been born a man? In this lecture, Alison McManus gives an insight into the process of creating a novel (one that she is writing as part of her PhD thesis in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle) that explores nineteenth-century gender issues from a twenty-first century perspective. Charlotte’s brother Branwell was employed as a tutor in a moderately-sized estate for a short time. Alison has stolen details from his life in order to invert the narrative conventions of Jane Eyre in her novel.
