Charlotte Bronte and food

Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte, the eldest of the three novelist sisters.  Having previously blogged about food in Jane Eyre (published 1847), I thought that today would be a good opportunity to revisit these posts and what we learn about food in Bronte's best-known novel.

Portrait of Charlotte Bronte at the Bronte Parsonage Museum

As I reread these posts I noticed the way Jane's relationship with food in the novel mirrors her journey to self-realization as a woman able to lead her life as she chooses.

Christmas Cake

Christmas is a favourite time of year in literature, with its appearance serving many different narrative functions.  It provides an occasion for characters to be reunited - as in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) where Tom Tulliver returns from school to his family.  Christmas can also provide drama, such as the Christmas meal in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861), during which the soldiers hunting the escaped prisoners - including Magwitch, whom the protagonist Pip has supplied with his sister's Christmas pork pie - arrive and disrupt proceedings.  In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published 18 years earlier in 1843 Christmas provides the motivation and opportunity for personal change, with the miserly Scrooge learning to love and give after he is visited by an array of ghosts.