One of the participants in our first Jane Eyre on the Moors travel study confessed that she doesn’t like Jane Eyre. She is signing up again for next year’s retreat. I’m taking this as a good sign.
I’d wanted to bring the London Literary Salon to Edale for a while. It’s a place I love, and I’d been waiting for the right literary connection — something that would give us a reason to gather here, rather than simply coming for the landscape. Then I discovered the Hathersage Jane Eyre connection. That was it.
Charlotte Brontë stayed in Hathersage in 1845 while visiting her friend Ellen Nussey, and the landscape and people she encountered seem to have made their way, in various forms, into the novel. Suddenly there was a book, a landscape and a reason to bring the Salon to Edale.
This summer, thirteen of us gathered for five days with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. People stayed in and around the village, and we had a base for reading, writing, eating and talking together. We read closely, walked, wrote, stretched in the mornings, listened to local folk music, and argued about Jane.
Edale isn’t Brontë country, though neighbouring Hathersage is very much Jane Eyre country. We stood in front of the building associated with Thornfield Hall and read from the novel. We walked out onto the moors where Jane, fleeing Thornfield and with nowhere else to go, eventually sleeps out in the open.
Landscape became one of the threads running through our conversations. Robert Macfarlane writes about the “topographies of the self” we carry within us, and asks what a strong landscape might know of us that we cannot know ourselves. We kept coming back to that idea as we thought about Jane: the enclosed rooms and open spaces, the places where she is confined and the places where she can breathe.
We brought poetry into the conversation too. Wendell Berry and Rita Dove gave us different ways of thinking about the natural world; Robert Frost gave us fire and ice; and LaWanda Walters’ Woodcut made us look again at the novel’s apparently happy ending and wonder what might remain underneath it.
And, of course, we talked about Jane.
Does she really change over the course of the novel, or does she simply become more fully herself? Can choosing to marry be a radical act? How manipulative is Jane? Is she a seductress? What do we make of Helen Burns and St John, and of the very different forms of Christianity they represent?
The red room led us into questions about fear, confinement, the Gothic, and the things a house is supposed to keep hidden. Bertha Mason proved harder to pin down. We talked about her as a character, a shadow, a literary device, a figure of otherness. Sometimes we agreed. Often we didn’t.
And that was one of the pleasures of the retreat. Someone would notice something another person had missed. Someone else would disagree. A question would lead somewhere unexpected. We weren’t trying to arrive at the ‘correct’ Jane Eyre. We were finding out what happens when thirteen people read the same book together.
Perhaps that is why our participant who doesn’t like Jane Eyre is coming back.
Our second Jane Eyre on the Moors study will take place in Edale from 29 July to 2 August 2027.
