Spooooooky

Ohmagoodness, they found the attic where Rochester imprisoned his wife! From the Sydney Morning Herald:

A cramped secret staircase winding up to a lonely garret has been rediscovered in the manor house which is credited with launching the literary genre of the "madwoman in the attic."

Carpeted with dust, cobwebs, and a solitary collar stud, 13 rotting steps lead into a gable end where the 18th-century original of Mrs. Rochester--the tragic enigma at the heart of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre--was allegedly confined...

The staircase, found when floorboards were lifted in an attic, fills in a missing piece of Bronte's description of "Thornfield Hall," where Mr Rochester lived with the governess Jane Eyre and--hidden away on the top floor--his "mad" first wife. Bronte visited Norton Conyers in 1839 and knew the story of the mansion's "madwoman"--probably epileptic or pregnant with an illegitimate child--who had been kept locked in an attic 60 years earlier.

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Um..."a solitary collar stud?!!!"

This makes me want to find my copy of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which I first read when I was a student at SFSU. Rhys fills in the gaps in the original narrative, gives voice and history to the "madwoman," and soundly indicts English colonialism in the Caribbean (Rochester's wife, whom Rhys names Antoinette, is a creole rejected by both white and black society). Anyways, it was a brilliant/beautiful/haunting read and a unique experience in that it's not often (for me, at least) that one work of fiction has so completely affected the way I read another.