Tea at Trianon: Jane Eyre's Attic

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Jane Eyre's Attic

The inspiration for the madwoman's attic at Thornfield Hall. To quote:

Novelist Charlotte Brontë penned the ‘madwoman in the attic’ based on her experiences vising the stately home of Norton Conyers, North Yorkshire, in 1839. Upon her visit, the author heard the homeowner’s “legend of a mad woman who had, sometime in the previous century, been confined in a remote attic room still known as ‘Mad Mary’s Room’”, the house’s website states. Eight years later, Brontë based Mason – the wife of her protagonist’s love interest Edward Rochester – on this elusive tale. In the book Jane Eyre, Mason is locked away in the upper enclaves of the home for ten years by her husband for being ‘mad’, before she sets fire to the home she shares with her spouse and throws herself off the roof. (Read more.)