ABSTRACT
The chapter argues for Jane Eyreas a novel rooted in, as well as sceptical of, a mid-Victorian imprint of beauty. It is not only the subject of female beauty that elicits a keen and divided response from the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's novel. The heroine's declaration that 'beauty is of little consequence' is the customary response she claims she should have given and qualifies the honesty for which she is otherwise esteemed. Although the beautiful women who populate Bronte's novel perturb the eponymous heroine, beauty in different forms does not cease to instruct or captivate. Paula Rego's Jane Eyre Series reinterprets the heroine's idiosyncratic regard for beauty and renders visually immediate the narrative 'art' of self-effacement in Bronte's novel. As such, Rego's twenty-first century artwork confronts the viewer with the striking yet unsettling interconnections between ekphrasis, identity and gender that nineteenth-century readers first met when Jane Eyre appeared, to much controversy, in October 1847.
