The Birth of a Myth The Early Spanish Reception of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre (1850s-1901)

Abstract

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.