De omzwervingen van een wees uit Lowood: De receptie van Jane Eyre in het negentiende-eeuwse Nederland

The transnational character of nineteenth-century novel and stage production can be illustrated by the reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the Netherlands and surrounding countries. The novel was translated into Dutch almost immediately after its English publication, but its critical reception went largely through French critics. The fact that the novel remained in the spotlight was initially also mainly due to the success of the stage adaptation by a German author: Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer. Her Die Waise aus Lowood was a great success throughout Europe and in the Netherlands, both in German and in translation. That the Dutch reception of the English novel Jane Eyre went via German and French detours is, above all, a symptom of a shared cultural taste in nineteenth-century Europe. Both the novel and the drama were carriers of the ideology and taste of a Western bourgeois class.