Discussion Literature / JaneEyre

This is very questionable:

• Alternate History: A very subtle example shows up at the very end of the book when Jane mentions Diana Rivers's happy marriage to a naval officer named Captain Fitzjames. The only Captain Fitzjames in the Royal Navy at the time the book was published, and a relatively well-known figure, was Commander (though he had held the acting post of captain) James Fitzjames, who would have been lost in the Arctic (and still single) with the doomed Franklin Expedition by the time the book was printed. (You might know him from the first season of The Terror.) From Jane's account, it sounds as though Diana and her husband's visits to the Rochester family are ongoing, meaning presumably in this book's timeline Fitzjames never went to the Arctic in the first place.

Not every detail in a work of fiction that doesn't match reality makes a book an Alternate History, especially a rather obscure detail such as this. Charlotte Bronte was almost certainly not checking the registers of enlisted men to make sure that any naval officer she happened to mention was in fact a real person; this is pure artistic license, nothing more. She's picked a name for a fictional naval officer inspired by a fairly well-known one, we're supposed to just assume that in the fictional world she's created there might just happens to be more than one naval officer with the name Fitzjames (at most, for all she would have likely known he might have had a brother also in the service or something). Jane Eyre is in no way a work of Alternate History as the genre is otherwise recognised and it's just wrong for us to act as if it is based on nothing more than a, frankly, rather minor and pedantic point as this.

Edited by DoctorNemesis

Can someone fix the title?

Optimism is a duty. Hide / Show Replies

I deleted this entry as it's not an example from this book. Plus "sort of" makes it Examples Are Not Arguable.

• Perspective Flip: Wide Sargasso Sea sort of qualifies. Parts 1 and 3 are narrated by Bertha. Part 2 is narrated by an unnamed Englishman. Reading the two together is a pretty awesome experience.