Jane Eyre, Horticulture and the Fern

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This article explores the interplay between the fern and Charlotte Brontë’s horticultural imagination in Jane Eyre (1847). The novel apparently shares an obvious ideological affinity with Victorian horticulture. Both Brontë’s Bildungsroman and Victorian horticulture are concerned with the development and improvement of an organic life. However, horticulture does not only bear on Brontë’s text metaphorically. This article shows that whenever Brontë alludes to the fern in the novel, she evokes real-life horticultural practices, such as John Loudon’s plant houses, Jane Loudon’s gardening lessons and Nathaniel Ward’s glazed cases. The novel engages with contemporary horticulture most subtly by describing how the fern transforms disciplinary regimes and restrictive enclosures calculated to restrain the heroine’s passionate nature. Consistently reconfiguring the claustrophobic environment with which Jane Eyre grapples, centring analysis on the fern invites a fresh understanding of her circumscribed existence. Examing the fern in Jane Eyre reveals how Brontë’s horticultural knowledge informs the feminist and colonial aspects of the novel.