Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright © 2009

In the Name of Jane: The Entitlement of a Private Self [1]  
by
Pusapati Teja Varma

  “I broke from St. John, who had followed and would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendancy. My
powers were in-play and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark; I desired him to leave me: I must and would be
alone. He obeyed at once” (Bronte 372)

The above lines mark a moment in the novel when Jane, the narrator, characterizes each of her
thoughts and gestures as being driven towards a project of willful self assertion. It registers an instance
of resilience wherein Jane triumphs overcomes a near erasure of every claim that she previously had to
her own body and soul. Struggling against St.John’s persistent and logical arguments in favour of a
loveless marriage, Jane finds herself growing “pliant as a reed under his kindness” (371). The
supernaturally sustained, telepathic voice of Rochester that allows her to rally her powers and choose
her course of action is tellingly one that echoes her own name: “Jane, Jane, Jane- nothing more” (371).
Her first name, in being a designation of all that she fashions for herself, refers to that part of her being
which, unlike the familially inherited or martially muted last name, remains a stable referent to the
agency of the central character in Bronte’s novel.

Jane Eyre is written in the form of a bildungsroman, which is driven by an unwavering focus on the
development of the protagonist’s sense of personhood. At the core of Jane Eyre, is the attempt to
discursively create a carefully delineated sense of feminine subjectivity: a subject that is crafted to
function as though it has an inner world which the reader might try to access by becoming a member
of the charmed and extended group of confidantes to whom the story of her life is “let out”. The novel
creates the effect of recording the life of this subject by drawing on certain tools that are exclusive to its
form, like its capacity to narrate temporal movement and change. It creates through its chronicle, a
feminine self whose ‘inside’ is created through a deeply conscious cultivation of its mental resources. Its
borders are drawn by a vigilant exclusion of influences that are seen as being uncongenial to the
development of that personhood. The judgments of the internal monitors of such a self are directed by
a highly specific construction of morality. It is oriented towards bolstering the site of dominant secular
morality within nineteenth century Britain: the household which practices the principles of the
monogamous, companionate marriage.
  
In such a project, the endowment of narrative centrality to a woman through the choice of a female
protagonist has important implications for the way in which nineteenth century society encoded
women’s relation to their domestic space. Jane’s non-fictional female counterparts had no licit existence
independent of their fathers or husbands, except in cases of accidental independence such as that of
Mrs. Reed. In a society in which did not allow women to possess territorial property of their own, the
novel affects a radical difference by proclaiming itself to be the authorial property of Jane Eyre. The
domain of the home incorporated a profound tension between sites available for female inhabitation
and the tenuous and threatened nature of their claims to that space. In the course of this paper, I will
probe the subtle changes that Bronte affects in that economy of social spaces. I will look at how those
maneuvers allow Bronte to stress the need for feminine access to that space as well as to complicate the
script of how a domesticated feminine self attains complete fruition in the space of the home [i].
  
The novel begins by foregrounding the tenuous nature of women’s access to the domestic space by
documenting in detail, an act of violence that is perpetrated against Jane’s body. Jane’s position as a
dependent, female orphan allows Bronte to explore the implications of gendered proprietorship of
spaces through a subject who is only grudgingly accommodated in the site of the home. As her cousin
John Reed states, “You ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the
same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense” (6). Excluded from the being a part of
the activities that constitute the Reeds as a family, like that of getting their portrait painted, Jane, the
“uncongenial alien” and “interloper”, can only seek solace and security by stealthily trying to create a
site that might accommodate her (11). “Slipping” into the small breakfast room, she creates a realm of
her own by climbing into the window seat and drawing the “red moreen curtain nearly close” (3). In
saying that the “double retirement” of the window seat facilitated Jane to feel as though she were
“enshrined”, the novel associates Jane’s vision of the privacy with notions of sanctity. In the latter part
of the novel, this quality of this sanctity is elaborated as that which emanates from the home of a
successful protestant marriage.
  
Having secured a volume of Bewick’s History of British Birds, she ravenously pours over the limitless
possibilities that each picture in the book seems to offer to her. Jane retrospectively states that such a
condition of private intellectual absorption sustained the highest state of happiness that she could ever
aspire for, within Gateshead Hall: “I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but
interruption, and that came too soon” (5). The secular enshrinement of the created privacy is
experienced as being a highly contested and dangerously vulnerable site. The ensuing lines include an
account of mental and physical abuse inflicted on her by her cousin John Reed. Significantly, the act of
violence begins with a dismissive distortion of her first name. Detecting her absence from the drawing
room he cries, “Where the dickens is she . . . Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain-
bad animal!” (5).

The first act of impropriety that John Reed suspects Jane to have committed is that of accessing the
wild exterior of the home : of exiting a realm over which he claims to have absolute control. John Reed,
the only male representative of feudal patriarchy in the early part of the novel, affirms his deferred but
certain ownership of every piece of property within Gateshead Hall. Provoked by Jane’s act of
trespassing into what he sees as his exclusive property, he threatens her with physical violence: “Now, I’
ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a
few years (6). He proceeds to spatially exile her from her window seat, a position that was to have a
paradigmatic status in invoking the ideal of a protected, private vantage point from which one could
access realms beyond the house: “Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and
windows” (6).
  
Jane’s banishment to the door, a site of physical and symbolic liminality, is indicative of the tentative
quality of her access to spaces. It is through deferral and denial of privacy to Jane that Bronte reveals
the etymological sense of the term private, which has crucial reverberations for my discussion on the
development of the feminine self. The word originates from the Latin privatus which gestured to
something that was "set apart, belonging to oneself" (and not to the state) which in turn was propped
by earlier forms of referring to the self, such as privare, which meant to "to separate, deprive," derived
from privus "one's own, individual".
  
While Bronte never uses the word private she does gesture towards the importance of spatial
demarcation for the construction of conditions conducive to creative self fashioning. For example, it is
only in the enclosed refuge of Miss Temple’s Room that Helen Burn can pursue her attempts at
reading without being interrupted. The room sustains at its centre, the classic signifier of the security of
the domestic space, the hearth. Jane observes in mute joy and awe as Miss Temple and Helen Burns
use the private room to traverse the unbounded opened up by the printed word. Their linguistic and
imaginative skill, and their vast store of studiously acquired knowledge, sustains unbridled discursive
travel and adventure. As Jane remarks,
       
They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past; of countries far away; of
secrets of nature discovered or guessed at; they spoke of books: how many they had read! What stores
of knowledge they possessed! Then they seem familiar with French names and French authors: but my
amazement reached its climax when Miss temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to
recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe
a page of Virgil. (62)
  
The congeniality of the above space to Helen’s endeavor of self exploration brings into relief through
contrast, normative spaces that are oriented towards stifling such ambitions. The moment stands in
stark contrast to several incidents within the novel when her attempts at moving beyond the ossified
routine of Lowood (resoundingly institutional in name and spirit) are met with severe verbal
reprimands and corporeal punishment. The durability of a private space that can be exclusively
inhabited and utilized by women is haltingly deferred: “She has scarcely finished ere the bell
announced bedtime! No delay could be admitted” (62).
  
Spatial autonomy remains a receding vision for most of Bronte’s characters. Jane can only fleetingly
inhabit its protective shadows, and partake of the several worlds it helps her to imagine, before the
structures of traditional authority identify her transgression and locate her in her “rightful” position by
banishing her from it. This is played out in the very first incident with John Reed that has been
discussed above. At Lowood, her privacy is constantly invaded by a schedule and by people who
demand her time and space. She needs to wait for a long time before she can post her letter to advertise
for a job that may open up other avenues for her.

The idea of the deferral of privacy has a correlative in the form of the very structure of Bronte’s plot,
which is organized around Jane’s incessant movement from one place to another in search of a stable
home . Unlike Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre is deeply self conscious about the
compromises that are inherent in the condition of being moored to a single site. Reviewing her status as
a teacher at Lowood after Miss Temple leaves its precincts to follow the course of matrimony, she pines
to move beyond the stultified monotony of mechanical curricula. Soliloquizing, she says,

“my world had for some years been Lowood . . . now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of
hopes and fears . . . awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek knowledge of life amidst its
perils . . . I desired Liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer” (72-73).

A gust of mild wind makes her imagine that her prayer demanded more than is permissible to her. As
she pauses to gauge the quality of agency that she may seek, she is quick to notice its difference from
her own notions of ideal freedom. Trying to access the next rung in the ladder of her desires, she
frames “a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus” (73). It is only when she realizes the
impossibility of having even that reduced petition answered in the world she inhabits, that she
fervently wishes for whatever change she may access: “That petition too swept off into a vague space:
‘Then’, I cried, half desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude!’” (73).
  
It is important to note that the security available to women within traditionally permissible sites is
discursively articulated as a model of confinement. This is evocative of the kind of tension that was
current to the intellectual climate of nineteenth century Britain and its debates on women. Locke’s idea
of self-fashioning and the novel’s articulation of the same within the site of domesticity, rested in
uncomfortable neighborhood with Mary Wollstonecraft’s advocacy of female agency and her
identification of the home as a site that quelled every essay of intellectual independence. In making one
notice in detail, the slow gradations and adjustments that are imposed on her heroine’s wishes by
virtue of her gender, Bronte underlines that her search for a new home is not indicative of “natural”, or
“obvious feminine desire”.
  
Having ascribed her protagonist’s quest for domestic mooring to cultural constraints, Bronte further
splinters the ideal of hearth-bound femininity by activating alternative trajectories of development. The
centrality of Bronte’s protagonist is cemented by the unparalleled nature of her choice to incessantly
seek, through relentless intellectual adventure, an uninterrupted space that may sustains her efforts of
self-fashioning. This allows Bronte to affect a trajectory that offers an alternative mode of acquiring
and experiencing the privileges of privacy: one that is not premised on being moored to a physical
location.
  
Jane constantly sneaks into corners at Gateshead Hall. When an onset of typhus fever gives the few
uninfected students at Lowood the opportunity to “ramble in the wood, like gypsies, morning to
night”, she chooses a secluded spot which allows her to discuss issues without interruption in the
chosen company of the intellectually stimulating Mary Ann Wilson. Having been excluded from the
halls and parlors at Thornfield that serve as venues of amusement and activity for its upper class
guests, she constantly lurks in corridors and passages. Retiring into the tuition room, she accesses its
meager store of books with pleasure. Her retirement is an act of active engagement and tireless effort
which is directed towards carefully sculpting out a haven that is not spatial and one that she may
undeniably claim as her own: a mind rich and capable of serving as unalienable property.
  
As in Mansfield Park, the impulse towards intellectual cultivation is fuelled by the female protagonist’s
acts of reading. However, unlike Edmund’s mentorship of Fanny, which is unquestioningly accepted
by her, Jane’s early choice of books is not guided by any equivalent of “natural” patriarchal control of
women’s reading. At Gateshead Hall, her access to reading material is led entirely by her own, highly
specific choice of literature. As a reader, she is conscious of why something does (or doesn’t) excite her
in a book: “The letter thereof, I cared little” (4). It is the introductory passages and the pictures and the
different worlds that they open up for her perusal, which she finds herself incapable of passing, “quite
as blank” (4). The possibility of traveling through impossible distances rivets her to the book: “Nor
could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Noval Zembla, Iceland,
Greenland”(4) .
  
It is significant that even as Bronte makes the reader recognize the vicarious nature of such knowledge,
she doesn’t constitute it as being impotent or ineffective. It is seen as enabling a transformative
potential in young Jane, who imaginatively recreates those realms [ii]. In making them products of her
mind, she lays on them, claims of uncontestable ownership: “Of these death white realms, I formed
ideas of my own” (4).
  
Bronte meticulously forges the idea of mental masonry and its capacity to a selfhood that is deeply self
conscious of its intangible, “inner” property. Looking at Jane’s paintings, Rochester is struck by the
kind of scenes she is capable of replicating in paint. It is through the image of a house and its
furnishing that he enquires about her source of creativity:

     ROCHESTER. Where did you get your copies?
     JANE. Out of my head.
     ROCHESTER. Has it other furniture of the same kind within? (109)
  
Rochester’s enquiries cast the provenance of her creativity in terms of a site, a space from “where” her
ideas emanate. This “inner” realm, with its carefully carpented “furniture”, is thought of as enabling
her to paint pictures that can catch the attention of a man like Rochester, whose gender and class give
him uninhibited access to the privileges of a gentleman’s education. The idea of feminine self
fashioning through reading, is, unlike in Mansfield Park, directly linked to the idea of economic
independence in Jane Eyre. It is her acquired intellect that allows her to move out of Lowood. Jane’s
non spatial property allows her to posit herself as Rochester’s kin.

As she says, “Though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my
blood and nerves that assimilates me mentally to him” (153). At a later point in the novel, she asserts
her independence and non destitute status to Hannah by laying claim to the skills that would always
facilitate her to “earn her keep” (301). It is this idea of a self that is conscious of the worth of its “inner
site”, that allows her to assert an alternative idea of privacy. In the novel, privacy is expressed as a
reservation of the rights of admission to certain parts of one’s interior self. In the face of near
annihilation and complete destitution, she affirms private proprietorship over her story by refusing to
divulge the full details of her life to the Rivers family. She only permits them access to certain aspects
that she deems appropriate.
  
The notion of intellectual architecture and its potential to arm women with independence is repeatedly
underlined in the novel. It occurs in the form of conventional professional choices available for women
in Jane and her cousins’ training as governesses. However, the contours of other possible avenues are
also suggested. Throughout the novel, there is an irresolvable tension between the recognition of the
necessary safety of the interior and the undeniable attraction of the unknown and unbridled prospects
of the exterior. Jane’s constant search for realms outside the fortified interiors of the various institutions
and homes she visits is expressed, not as accidental marauding but as an act of self conscious decision-
making on her part.

As noted earlier, the move to another station of conservative, genteel service is articulated as an aspect
of Jane’s awareness of social registers and cultural constraints. She draws on every resource, and works
through carefully drafted letters to willfully discard the protective interiors of Lowood. At Thornfield,
she constantly accesses the battlements and their panoramic view of the world outside. Even as the
exteriors are mapped in terms of fatal dangers (Jane is almost killed in her act of wandering through
the moorland), they are nevertheless, in their very unpredictability, shown to be landscapes which hold
out the promise of change.
  
This trajectory takes on radical proportions in Jane’s prescient proposition to St. John Rivers, wherein
she offers her services as a fellow professional. She volunteers to brave the physical adversities that
characterized the colonies for the British imagination in the nineteenth century. However, she refuses
to be moored in conventional matrimony to the man whose professional aide she offers herself to be. In
this proposition of Jane, the novel predicates the possibility of a feminine self whose independence is
not anchored to the site of the domestic. In that sense, the world outside the home is held out for the
exploration of the female character, as it would’ve been and is, for the male characters of the novel.

Even as the novel carefully contains this trajectory by plotting Jane’s fantastic rise to property and
power, it does mark the beginning of a vision of work based gender parity, wherein alliances between
men and women need not be sanctified by marriage. By the end of the novel, Jane not only emerges as
someone who has property and is thereby not dependent on Rochester, but also as someone who can
sustain a home that will allow for companionship. Imagining that Rochester may not want to marry
her, she holds out the prospect of a home which can sustain a friendship outside of matrimony: “if you
wont let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come
and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening” (385)..
  
The novel creates a fundamental nexus between the quality of such feminine subjectivity and its
implications for the domain of the home. The self capable of sustaining a certain quality of religion by
evincing devotion towards the sustenance of the codes of a monogamous, Protestant home, is central to
the novels articulation of spaces. The ideal spaces in the novel are those whose inhabitants carry
“within” them, a conscience that is untainted by transgression of the above codes. Rochester cannot
inhabit a stable home, however unquestionable his ownership of that property may be, until he
amasses for himself, what Jane calls “a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you may
revert with pleasure” (120). Mental introspection and the Lockean notion of self conscious thought are
inflected by the considerations that drive Protestant morality. Homes that are “sullied” by loveless
marriages and a breach of familial promises, like Thorn-field and Gateshead, are shown to be
incapable of surviving, much like their masters.
  
The novel ensures that the code of protestant martial sanctity is relentlessly carried throughout the
novel, by having a heroine who is shown to have educated herself into internalizing its moral codes.
Jane’s mode of spatial ingression is predominantly ocular. While this mode of intangible access is true
for almost every character in the novel (servants, cousins, masters, etc.), Jane retains the spotlight by
bringing the perspective of others into relief by virtue of the singular quality of her vision. In her alone,
it becomes a moral eye, oriented towards a critical judgment of people’s motives and their
“rightfulness”, determined by the implications of their actions for the novel’s ideal of a monogamous
marriage.
   
She constantly judges the conduct of people, by looking beyond their exhibition of polite manners.
Jane makes a conscious separation between an extrinsic self mannered by conduct books and the
“real” self, which she articulates as being reachable only by moving beyond the performances of social
decorum. In that she makes a distinction between material property and “real” property. Jane likens
behavioral propriety to the external structure of a house, beyond whose walls one must move to access
the “true” self, which is articulated through the image of an inner, sanctified domesticity: the hearth.
As Jane says, “ I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet and refined minds, whether
male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of
confidence, and won a place by their heart’s very hearthstone” (331). The image of the hearthstone
strikes one as being remarkably secular in relation to the deeply religious images proposed by St. John,
who is representative of institutionalized Protestant theology within the novel. However, it is far more
rewarding to explore, as is evident in the resolution offered by Jane Eyre( and several other novels
written in nineteenth century Britain), the immersion of the Protestant religious ideals within the site
that was actively posited as being ideal for its propagation, the stable home of the Protestant families.
When this self, moored in the contemporary religious ideal of a monogamous marriage, is threatened
by the prospect of being sullied by bigamy, Jane leaves Thornfield and chooses “drear flight and
homeless wandering” in its stead (283).
  
It is through the idea of fidelity and monogamy, that the body is given centrality in the novel. Its
heroine is described to be unmistakably plain. She has the body, not of a sexually desirable woman
but one who will constantly foreground her capacity for unbridled passion. Her love of Rochester,
which is undiminished in the face of extreme adversity and physical mutilation, is central to Jane’s
subscription to the idea of a companionate marriage. In the novel, the deceptiveness of an insincere
passion is rendered through the image of the ignus fatus, and the organized frameworks of contracted
marriages are shown to lead inevitably to uncontrollable and destructive fires.  

When Jane lies unconscious on the doorstep of Moor House, fully vulnerable and almost taken for a
vagrant, the “inner” self constructed through its unflinching adherence to the above principles, leaves
an indelible mark of respectability on her body. Through St.John’s reading of her physiognomy, he
deciphers her character as one that is “certainly not indicative of vulgarity or degradation” (300).. It is
this moral self that she values and affirms in the face of Rochester’s arguments in favour of bigamy,
and his dismissal of any possible fear of social opprobrium for one as unconnected as her. It is her
British Protestant code of morality that makes Rochester admit that she inviolable, unlike his other
mistresses.
  
Through a maneuver that is allied to the scripting of certain codes onto Jane’s body, the very
availability of her body and her privacy is shown to be highly selective. Jane is repeatedly shown to be
under the “ceaseless surveillance” of those around her (163). She seems to be in greatest physical and
emotional danger when she is not aware of the glance, as in the instances of her being surveyed by
Bertha Mason. This seems to be indicative of the way in which female figures were organized within
the seventeenth century Dutch interior paintings of Pieter De Hooch. These and others of the same
genre had an unmistakable influence in the importation of the topography of interiority into the
congenial Protestant neighborhood of the nineteenth century British novel. In a painting entitled
Mother’s Duty, a woman is shown to be completely involved in the domestic work of sewing.

The condition in which she is captured within the painting is indicative of the situation which Michael
Fried theorized as a state of “absorption” (7). Talking of Jean Baptiste Gruez’s painting "Un Pere De
Famille" he talks of how the female figures of the painting are completely unaware of their status of
being objects of visual consumption. Jane seems to be under a similar scanner, both in terms of being
viewed by other characters within the novel, as well as being open to the scrutiny of the reader.
  
However, in rendering her story through an omniscient narrator, and in deploying the technique of
hindsight, the privacy of the central character (which, as I have tried to argue, accommodates more
than physical space) is always secured by the novelist. The narrative device that is the character of Jane
Eyre makes her control of our reading positions clear. Therefore, the kind of tension that would be
apparent in a De Hooch painting does not exist in a novel with a relentlessly self conscious female
protagonist. This impetus for constant vigilance is verbally testified through the use of several asides
and direct addresses to the reader, which inform the reader of processes of editing, selection and
subjective emphases. Unlike the Dutch interior paintings of De Hooch, the novel has at its disposal,
expressive tools like monologues, views of other characters and soliloquies, through which it can make
the reader move beyond the physical body of the heroine to the realm of the female mind.
  
Having stated the above, one needs to investigate the implications of such details for the effect that was
central to the nineteenth century realist novel. If the reader is given a verbal tour of the factory of
fiction production and the way in which its machinery works , how does one account for the success of
the genre in earning the reader’s investment in the myth of spontaneous, naturally expressed
“reality”? One of the central techniques used to resolve this tension is the trope of interiority. It is by
creating the effect of revealing confidentially, an “inner” self and the way in which it constructed itself
that the novel achieves the effect of “showing all”.
  
The novel, in being a retrospective account of the fashioning of the feminine subjectivity, shares its
name with that of the protagonist. It is the first name, a referent of her consciously cultivated
personhood that Jane refuses to relinquish, even in the alias, Jane Eliot, which she adopts for survival.
By the time she begins her tale, she isn’t Jane Eyre anymore, but Jane Rochester. Bronte’s
contemporary readers would recognize the status of Jane Rochester as one who has forfeited all her
property and economic independence to her husband through marriage. However, the novel
articulates the female self as having amassed alternative estates. It is in the name of her meticulously
moulded and carefully gendered self, that Jane lays claim to authorship. In that, Bronte makes her
narrator do that which she, in being socially constrained to publish under the masculine pseudonym of
Currer Bell, couldn’t.


   [i] A representative example of such a self would be the character of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who
severely guards the self from marauding into spaces outside the domestic space.
  [ii]  In this idea of the transformative agency of one’s imagination, as in the idea of the mind acting as a
repository of peaceful, therapeutic memories, one hears the unmistakable echo of Romantic ideas of the
human mind. Jane Eyre was first published in 1847, which makes it contemporaneous to most of
Wordsworth’s work. While the exploration of how women novelists like Bronte use and influence the ideas
of the male Romantic poets might raise interesting questions vis-à-vis the issues I have tried to address, it is
beyond the scope of the above paper.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Books Limited, 1994.

Bronte, Emily. Jane Eyre. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2003.

Fried, Micheal. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.
  1980. Chicago: The University Of California Press, 1988.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.1690. eBooks@Adelaide. Rendered into
  HTML by Steve Thomas. 2007. The University of Adelaide Library,University of Adelaide. 26 August 2000.

Woolstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed.W. Scott.1892.Electronic Text Centre,
University of Virginia Library. Rev. for corrections by Samuel A. Turner.2000. University of Virginia
Library,Charlottesville. 26 August 2009.

Note: [1] This paper was written in March 2009 for the seminar ‘The Construction of Social Space in the Nineteenth
Century English Novel’ supervised by Dr. Sambudha Sen. Its written version draws from the many insights that he and
my fellow students at the seminar generously shared with me.

Contributor's Notes...

Pusapati Teja Varma holds a B.A.and M.A. in English Literature, and is currently an M.Phil student at the English
department, University of Delhi.  She teaches English Literature to undergraduate students at Lady Shri Ram
College.  She has published in the Delhi University students’ journal Literophile on the poetry of Kamala Das and
on issues of censorship in Literature.  Her current research looks to investigate the interface between the private
and the public in late Victorian England, by analyzing formulations of gender, performance and female “vocation”.

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