reading on Mansoor

Influences and references in Jane Eyre

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“You were a reader before you were a writer.” J.D. Salinger

The events of Charlotte Bronte’s own life provided material for Jane Eyre, but the novel is also full of references and allusions to literature:

The Bible
The Arabian Nights
Sacred Songs and Lalla Rookh, “Paradise and the Peri” by Thomas Moore
The Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke
The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, and Marmion by Sir Walter Scott
“Die Braut von Korinth (The Bride of Corinth)” by Goethe
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Paradise Lost by Milton
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Multiple Shakespeare plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra
“The Bonnie Wee Thing” by Robert Burns
Greek Mythology
Blackwood’s Magazine: “The Demoniac”, “The Burning of Indian Widows”, and “The Spectral Dog — An Illusion”
Bluebeard, the pirate folk tale
The League of the Rats by Jean de la Fontaine
The Bride of Abydos by George Gordon Byron
The Iron Shroud by William Mudford
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“To a Skylark” by By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The introspection of Jane Eyre

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There’s a self-awareness to Jane as a narrator that’s both very specific and beautifully worded:

I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful obedience to St John’s directions; (ch xxxiv)

Two powerful quotes from Jane Eyre

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Both of these made me stop reading and just think. The footnotes pointed out the structure of the first: four statements in passive voice that emphasize the active voice of the fifth. The second one takes the reader by surprise and is just…beautiful.

The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out. (ch xxviii)

‘And I shall see it again,’ he said aloud, ‘in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges; and again, in a more remote hour - when another slumber overcomes me, on the shore of a darker stream!’ (ch xxxiv)

Jane Eyre was written by a woman

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Charlotte Bronte first released Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell to give the impression the novel had been written by a man. This footnote is a funny (and sobering) explanation of why.

From the novel:

From school duties she was exonerated: Mrs Fairfax had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes.

Jane Eyre: Words and phrases

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There are many more, of course, but these are a few that I jotted down:

Bethesda - a pool of sacred healing in Jerusalem
Cachination - immoderate laughter
Cui bono - For whose good
Deo Volante - God Willing
Hebdomadal - every seven days
Juggernaut - Jaganath (Krishna)
Par parenthese - by the way
Prenomens - Forename
Tant pis - too bad

The Eve of Waterloo

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s Capital had gathered then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

Brave New World: Unless we decentralize

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

From the Author’s Foreword to the 1946 edition:

All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atom revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Brave New World: An efficient totalitarian state

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

From the Author’s Foreword to the 1946 edition:

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient - and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Brave New World: Author's Foreword to the 1946 Edition

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Aldous Huxley explains why he didn’t change the “considerable” defects of Brave New World in the new edition.

CHRONIC REMORSE, AS all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Success

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 12:00:00 -0400

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of the intelligent people
and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
to know that one life has breathed easier
because you lived here.
This is to have succeeded.