Bluefield, WV marks a change in my life because it is where I was staying, with my ex fiancé, when I realized I did not love him. It’s his hometown, and a beautiful place, but the longer I spent there with him the week that I visited, the more that I realized I would never want a life with him and that I had much bigger dreams and expectations than what he could even try to support me in or be part of.
Compton, California marks a change in my life because it shows me what my father went through growing up. My dad always told us stories about how hard his life was as a kid and I always thought it to be another "back in my day story" until taking the time to visit his town. If someone else were researching this place, they'd probably find it through old school rap songs or movies like "Boyz In The Hood", etc. This location showed me a change in community and surroundings.
North Lees Hall is significant to Jane Eyre because Charlotte Bronte visited it in 1845 while staying nearby with her friend Ellen Nussey, and its battlemented facade and three-story manor-house design closely match her description of Thornfield in the novel.
Refer to the handout that lists and organizes the real and mappable fictional places connected to Jane Eyre into five groups, based on the role each place plays in the novel: the imaginative and allusive places Jane reads about or paints, the colonial and imperial geography behind the novel's wealth and marriage plots, continental Europe and Rochester's past, UK sites, and fictional places with a documented real-world location behind them.
Hathersage marks a change in my life, as when I first visited here several years ago while researching a scholarly article, I had no idea this area was so beautiful and the village so quaintly British (image above).
Before we map Jane Eyre, let's practice with something personal: a real place tied to a change in your life; a new school, a move, a hometown you left. Jane Eyre is structured almost like an autobiography, and the novel moves through a series of houses (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, and beyond), each one marking a different chapter of Jane's life.
