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.
Footnote:
to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes: Elizabeth Rigby’s scathing review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review quoted a ’lady friend’ to the effect that ’no woman trusses game and garnishes dessert-dishes with the same hands, or talks of so doing in the same breath’ (CA, Vol. III, p. 52). Thus, the novel must have been written by a man or by a woman so depraved as to have ’long forfeited the society of her own sex’ (p. 53).
