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MANY YEARS AGO, I was struck by the Romantic weathers at the end of Emma and the beginning of Jane Eyre, and wondered if Charlotte Brontë chose "Jane" and Rochester's middle name "Fairfax" because of Jane Fairfax. Brontë said she didn't read Emma until after Jane Eyre appeared on 16 October 1847 (Letters 2.S49, Gordon 14S), then violently attacked its author, but did she in fact draw on Emma and re-write it? And did she see that Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication permeates Emma almost as much as it does Jane Eyre?
First, the similarities. In Emma, "The evening of this day was very long, and melancholy, at Hartfield. The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling" (421): Jane Eyre wanders similarly in a "leafless shrubbery," where "cold winter wind" brings somber clouds and penetrating rain (7). As to the name Fairfax, that may refer to Thomas Fairfax, a Parliamentary general during the English Civil War. Like him, Jane Fairfax is sickly but honorable. Even Charles I, whom Fairfax helped depose, called him a man who "ever kept his word" (qtd. in Gentles), while Milton begged him to use his "firm unshak'n vertue" to clear "the shameful 1 brand/ Of Public Fraud" ("On the Lord Gen. Fairfax" 5, 12-1S). Jane Fairfax, "'the most upright female mind in the creation,'" also loathes her "'life of deceit'" (4S7, 459). Frank, says Emma, has "'None ofthat upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life'" (397), but Jane Austen herself may recall Lord Fairfax.1
Whether Brontë remembered the Puritan or the governess, both Jane Fairfax and the Jane who marries Edward Fairfax Rochester subdue their passions and appearance. Jane Fairfax's grey eyes and reserve (167-69) anticipate the self-controlled, "Quaker-like" governess Jane Eyre, who rejects pink satin for sober black and pearl-grey (10S, 281). Frank flirts with Emma while secretly engaged, and Mr. Rochester proposes bigamy. Marriage rescues Jane Fairfax from the Bragges, Smallridges, and Sucklings (S 80), and Mr. Rochester's proposal prevents Jane Eyre fleeing to the O'Galls of Bitternutt Lodge...