How The Turn of the Screw drew on Jane Eyre
A documented line of influence: Henry James demonstrably engaged Charlotte Brontë’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On The Turn of the Screw’s page
- James's governess narrates against Jane Eyre — she half-casts herself as a Jane who might win her remote master, then wonders if Bly hides "an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement"
- That's Bertha Mason by name-without-the-name; Brontë's madwoman in the attic is the haunting James is rewriting
- Read Jane Eyre first and you hear the echo — and the difference: Brontë gives her governess love and daylight, James gives his only the ghosts
On Jane Eyre’s page
- The governess novel James couldn't stop circling — Brontë's plain heroine, alone in a great house with a master she half-loves, was the fictional governess that took the deepest hold on him
- The Turn of the Screw keeps Jane's premise and strips out her happy ending: a governess, an absent master, a house with a secret in it
- James even lets his narrator allude to Bertha Mason — the "insane, unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement" — as the model she fears she's walked into