Reading-While-Walking: Books and Material Culture in Jane Eyre (1847) and Milkman (2018)

As with many Victorian novels, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) reflects and thematises society's obsession with material culture. This article investigates the contrasting ways in which books are appraised in Jane Eyre, arguing that patriarchal authority and its imposed vigilance over female bodies appear to be connected to the ways in which its characters engage with books. To unpack this argument, I propose a close reading of the novel's opening scene, in which John Reed confiscates Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds (1797–1804) from Jane Eyre and reclaims it as his own. Further, I propose an analysis of the intertextual relationship between Jane Eyre and Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a contemporary novel that posits the book as a contested object in the public space. In both novels, the protagonist/narrator finds in storytelling a way to circumvent the barriers placed over their access to books in early life.