Déjà lu: prophetic reading in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Shirley

Abstract

In Charlotte Bront's 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley', an attentive reader is able to find more than meets the eye. While any contemporary reader reads these stories and enjoys them - or not, the reader who did it by the time of their first publication, who was used to reading great works, would actually appreciate them by interacting with the text and understanding their intertextual relations with literary works such as the Bible. Recognizing the dialogue between 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley' with other literary works, mainly the Bible, enables the reader, among other things, to make guesses on the characters' future. Such reading has been lost due to the lack of Biblical knowledge by most contemporary readers. In this sense, my work intends to analyze 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley' by comparing their plots and the way they confirm or frustrate the reader's expectations towards the future of those characters having as reference the stories from Scriptures. Besides analyzing these novels, though, I propose a discussion on the types of reader who could possibly read and appreciate them. Also, I draw the religious scenario in which they were written in order to see the Biblical allusions through the lenses of the historical reader, understanding the predictions he or she would make, to observe if the allusions confirm or deny the Biblical text.