Brontë Society Creative Competition

I recently entered these two illustrations in the Brontë Society Creative Competition – had I got myself into gear earlier I may have entered more, but this was the minimum (2-4 illustrations), and you know that I like a deadline!!

I chose Jane Eyre to illustrate as it really is my favourite Brontë novel of those I have read, I think it is wildly romantic in a kind of buttoned-down, early Victorian way, Jane’s true passionate self bursting through after years of suppression at Lowood.  It has it all, including the superb Mr Rochester.  And she draws!

I’ll carry on with this as I have a few more illustrations started (but not come to fruition, well not sufficiently to submit) but here goes – my idea was not to include Jane in the images and to show them from her perspective, as she narrates the story of course – so she would only be seen in a mirror:

Chapter II: “Returning, I had to cross before the looking glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms speckling the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit...”
Chapter II:
“Returning, I had to cross before the looking glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily
explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in
reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms speckling
the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real
spirit…”
Chapter XIX: [About the 'Sibyl'] “She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze...'
Chapter XIX:
[About the ‘Sibyl’]
“She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could
see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf-locks
bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her
cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze…’

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