Department of English

• Thursday, October 30, 2025 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135)

A Singular Person: Bertha, Grace, and Care in Jane Eyre

What happens if we read Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre through the lens of care? We might start by reconsidering her attendant, Grace Poole. Readers usually accept Jane’s and Rochester’s assessment of Grace as Bertha’s dour, untrustworthy jailer, but Grace’s history—made visible in small hints along the way—affords us a chance to think of her differently. What might Bertha look like from Grace’s point of view? What agency and emotions might Grace experience? How might Grace’s and Bertha’s care relation reveal new elements of Jane Eyre? In this talk, I use Grace as an example of the kind of reading we might do if we take caregivers seriously in Victorian fiction. Domestic work constituted the largest employment sector in the era, and I argue that just as servants kept Victorian households going, so too do they sustain the work of narrative. Part of a larger project called “Starting with Service,” I argue for a theory of character based on figures like Grace, a theory that regards characters as networked, relational entities whose primary function is to offer care, and whose carework needs to be read as essential to the functioning of the novel.

Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (2021), shortlisted for the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize, Honorable Mention for the NAVSA prize for the Best Book in Victorian Studies; Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (2016), which won the NAVSA prize for the best book of the year; Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001). Her co-edited volumes include Care and Disability: Relational Representations (2025) with D. Chris Gabbard; The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (2020), with Dennis Denisoff; a special issue of Victorian Review, “Extending Families,” with Kelly Hager (2013); and Women and British Aestheticism with Kathy A. Psomiades (1999). She has also edited Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006) and Lucas Malet's 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003). Schaffer has published more than 50 articles on topics including Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, ethical readings, women writers, material culture, popular fiction, and aestheticism.