The Birth of a Myth: The Early Spanish Reception of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre (1850s-1901)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2022-44.2.05Abstract
Eight years after the publication of Jane Eyre, on March 31, 1855, Charlotte Brontë died in Haworth, already an “idol” in her native country. Her best-known novel had catapulted her to fame. In spite of such prompt success in England and its early translations into other languages such as French, it would take 81 years to have the first renderings of Jane Eyre in Spain in book format. Nevertheless, other channels apart from translations contributed to feeding the myth, although it was modest and vague in its early years. This article examines the early reception of Charlotte Brontë in the Spanish press of the nineteenth century and analyses the first manifestations of the novel in, mainly, the Spanish literary system but also in America, which adopted quite varied “shapes” that reveal the ever-expanding quality of this classic book.
Downloads
References
Alvarado Cornejo, Marina. 2018. “La sección folletín de la prensa chilena desde 1842 a 1900.” Anales de literatura chilena 30: 53-71.
Astor Guardiola, Aurora. 2006. Proceso a la leyenda de las Brontë. Valencia: Universitat de València.
Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1986. La novela naturalista española: Emilia Pardo Bazán. Murcia: Secretariado de la Universidad de Murcia.
Benjamin, Walter. (1923) 1992. “The Task of the Translator.” In Theories of Translation. An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 71-82. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bloom, Harold. 2007. “Introduction.” In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, edited by Harold Bloom, 1-6. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cáceres Würsig, Ingrid. 2000. “La traducción en España en el ámbito de las relaciones internacionales, con especial referencia a las naciones y lenguas germánicas (s. xvi-xix).” PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Cachin, Marie-Françoise. 2013. “Victorian Novels in France.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, 185-205. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cardwell, Richard A. 2004. “‘El Lord Sublime’: Byron’s Legacy in Spain.” In The Reception of Byron in Europe. Volume 1: Southern Europe, France and Romania, edited by Richard A. Cardwell, 144-163. London: Thoemmes Continuum.
Casadesús Hernández, Cristina. 2017. “Jane Eyre. Problemas de traducción de la novela romántica inglesa.” End-of-degree paper, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Chapple, John and Alan Shelston. (2000) 2003. Further Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Cooper-Richet. 2019. “La presse hispanophone parisienne au XIXe siècle. El correo de ultramar et les autres.” Çédille: Revista de estudios franceses 16: 81-100.
Coperías, María José. 2010. “Introducción.” In Jane Eyre. 9-71. Madrid: Cátedra.
Crespo Hidalgo, Juan. 2007. “Políticas de traducción en la España del siglo XIX.” In Traductores y traducciones de literatura y ensayo (1835-1919), edited by Juan Jesús Zaro, 45-72. Granada: Comares.
El Pueblo. 1919. “Teatro Principal.” El Pueblo. November 27, 2.
Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana. 1958. Vol. xxxvi. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1034.
Figuerola, Carme. 2021. “La traducción de la narrativa francesa en el siglo XIX.” In Historia de la traducción en España. Portal digital de Historia de la traducción en España, edited by Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute. <http://phte.upf.edu/hte/siglo-xix/figuerola/>
Galván, Fernando and Paul Vita. 2013. “The Spanish Dickens: Under Cervantes’s Inevitable Shadow.” In The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Volume I, edited by Michael Hollington, 161-181. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
García González, José Enrique and Fernando Toda. 2014. “The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Spain.” In The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, 45-63. London: Bloomsbury.
Hateley, Erica. 2005. “The End of The Eyre Affair: Jane Eyre, Parody, and Popular Culture.’ The Journal of Popular Culture 38 (6): 1022-1036.
Henrich y Girona, Joaquín. 1881. Ensayo sobre la literatura inglesa. Barcelona: Imp. Sucesores de Ramirez y Cª.
La Discusión. 1883. “Variedades. Un periodista.” La discusión. November 21, 3.
La Lectura. 1901. “Un editor inglés.” La Lectura. January, 129.
Lafarga, Francisco. 2021. “El pensamiento sobre la traducción en el siglo XIX.” In Historia de la traducción en España. Portal digital de Historia de la traducción en España, edited by Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute. <http://phte.upf.edu/hte/siglo-xix/lafarga-3/>
Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2016. “George Eliot in Spain.” In The Reception of George Eliot in Europe, edited by Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown, 209-236. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Marín Hernández, David. 2007. “Los hermanos Zemganno” de Emilia Pardo Bazán: la traducción como manifiesto literario.” In Traductores y traducciones de literatura y ensayo (1835-1919), edited by Juan Jesús Zaro, 321-358. Granada: Comares.
Martínez Martín, Jesús A. 1991. Lectura y lectores en el Madrid del siglo XIX. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Masriera, Arturo. 1913. “El catalanismo literario en las regiones.” La Vanguardia. September 7, 8.
Medina Calzada, Sara. 2014. “Towards a New Canon: Ensayo sobre la literatura inglesa (1881) and the Reception of English Literature in Spain in the Nineteenth Century.” Estudios humanísticos. Filología 36: 141-155.
—. 2016. “Jane Eyre on the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stage: Intertextuality and Adaptation in Francisco Morera’s Version of Charlotte Brontë’s Novel.” Odisea 17: 69–82.
Miller, Lucasta. (2001) 2005. The Brontë Myth. New York: Anchor Books.
Ortega Sáez, Marta. 2013. “Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo: El caso de Jane Eyre de Juan G. de Luaces (1943).” PhD diss., University of Barcelona.
Pajares Infante, Eterio. 2007. “Traducción y censura: Cumbres borrascosas en la dictadura franquista.” In Traducción y censura en España (1939-1985). Estudios sobre corpus TRACE: cine, narrativa, teatro, edited by Raquel Merino lvarez, 49-104. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco/Universidad de León.
Pegenaute, Luis. 2004. “La época romántica.” In Historia de la traducción en España, edited by Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute, 321-396. Salamanca: Editorial de Ambos Mundos.
Pyrhönen, Heta. 2010. Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and its Progeny. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
Reynolds, Matthew and Giovanni Pietro Vitali. 2021. “Mapping and Reading a World of Translations: Prismatic Jane Eyre.” Modern Languages Open 1 (23): 1-18.
Rubik, Margarete and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, eds. 2007. A Breath of Fresh Eyre. Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. Amsterdam and Nueva York: Rodopi.
Rubio Jiménez, Jesús. 1984. “La censura teatral en la época moderada: 1840–1868. Ensayo de aproximación.” Segismundo 39–40: 193–231.
Rubio Martos, Amelia. 2019. “Carmen Martín Gaite.” Master’s thesis, University of Málaga.
Rueda Laffond, José Carlos. 2001. “La fabricación del libro. La industrialización de las técnicas en el siglo XX.” In Historia de la edición en España, 1836-1936, directed by Jesús Martínez Ortín, 73-110. Madrid: Marcial Pons.
St. André, James. 2008. “Relay Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 230-231. London-New York: Routledge.
Stone, John. 2021. “The Earliest Spanish Dickens? The 1844 Alborada Translation of Pickwick’s ‘Madman’s Manuscript’.” Dickens Quarterly 38 (2): 140-162.
Stoneman, Patsy. 1996. Brontë Transformations. The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf.
—. 2007. Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898. An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual Notes. London and New York: Routledge.
Williams, Rachel. 2012. “The Reconstruction of Feminine Values in Mme Lesbazeille-Souvestre’s 1854 Translation of Jane Eyre.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 7 (1): 19-33.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
