Speaker - John Farrell

It is sometimes overlooked that Jane Eyre is a classic Bildungsroman that narrates Jane's formative years and spiritual education. Even more deliberately, it is a journey narrative. But Jane’s travels follow two incompatible paths. Both paths are narratively constructed as pilgrimages. Charlotte Brontë’s task in the novel—and Jane’s as well—is to make these pilgrimages converge. Their convergence is achieved only as Jane learns to comprehend a poetic language that emerges mysteriously from the novel’s narrative.

John P. (‘Jack’) Farrell joined the English Department at UT in 1974 as an Associate Professor and retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus. Among his publications are Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold and more than fifty essays on Romantic and Victorian literature—the latest of which is ‘Romance Narrative in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes’. He is a founding member of the British Studies seminar.