Historical Afterword
While Jane Eyre needs no introduction, I should mention that Charlotte Bront?’s preface to the infamous second edition thrilled me from the instant I first set eyes on the quote, “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.” While the author continues to lob great Molotov cocktails of scriptural invective at her critics for perhaps a trifle longer than necessary (if Bront? lived today, it wouldn’t be impossible to picture her replying to troll tweets and one-star Amazon reviews), the spirit of the thing is marvelous, and to anyone who has read the novel without the preface, know that it was a major inspiration for this satirical riff off the classical Jane.
The position of women in the nineteenth century was notoriously fraught with economic peril and rife with class divisions, and nowhere is this more evident in Jane Eyre than when the haughty Blanche Ingram rails against governesses as if they are repulsive insects children have every right to squash ruthlessly. Marriage to a rich man was a respectable way to make a fortune—but to be educated and servile at once, raising the children of others simply due to reduced circumstances, was considered a ghastly fate. Richard Nemesvari, who edited the careful scholarly edition of Jane Eyre I myself used, suggests regarding Blanche’s tirade announcing “half of them [governesses] detestable and the rest ridiculous” that:
On one level this is purely a rude attempt to put Jane in her place, but it is also an attempt by Blanche to establish her own place . . . It is absolutely essential for Blanche to despise all governesses, because only in this way can she ensure (in her own mind and others’) that there is no connection or potential relationship between them.
Naturally, this made the notion of writing a serial killer governess who was also in all likelihood a wronged heiress cracking good fun, and while Jane Steele is a far more egalitarian soul than Blanche Ingram, she also has no strong objection to pretty frocks, good whiskey, large estates, expensive horses, or marriage to a brooding Byronic hero.
It would be ludicrous to pretend that I could have grasped Sikhism after only six months’ research, but a few books in particular were of immense help. First, The Sikh Religion by Max Arthur MacAuliffe (1842–1913) was written by an Englishman whose love of the Punjabi religion was roundly ridiculed by his associates within the Indian Civil Service, who really didn’t think converting was quite the done thing, by gad. Responsible for producing the first UK translation of the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, MacAuliffe continued to pen English-language volumes about Sikh history with the help of Pratap Singh Giani, a brilliant linguist and calligraphist who among other prestigious accomplishments worked as a scripture-reader in Amritsar, the holy city. Second, The First and Second Sikh Wars was commissioned by the British Army in 1911, and military historian Reginald George Burton executed his mission with tremendous care and detail—for which I’m grateful, as it’s nigh impossible to picture a battle when you’ve never been in one.