::A Jane for All Generations::

JOHN Braine, author of Room at the Top, thinks that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre had a great influence on his own writing- and on his own Yorkshire childhood generally.

I mett him at his office in Woking, Surrey, a cramped broom closet kind of a room which just manages to hold his own desk- a place of work a long way from Joe Lampton's idea of the de luxe.

Speaking of Charlotte Bronte, the 51-year-old author mellows and almost the apolectically angry television pundit one so often sees ripping the innards out of left-wing ideas fades away.

Charlotte Bronte made me realise that the only real material for a writer is what he knows best. There's no need to go looking for exotic backgrounds you don't understand. I came from Bingley, Yorkshire, and from my attic window I could see the beginning of the moors to Haworth where the Bronte's lived, and I used to walk the road that Charlotte used to take to get out there, the very self-same road.

'Jane Eyre is really a liberated girl,' he says admiringly, 'but not an immoral girl- far from it- a staunch Christian. But though her morals are conventional enough, she doesn't have any feelings at all about Rochester's lurid past. She knows Rochester is a middle-aged rake, but in this she's curiously modern. She goes for the old rake with a bit of experience. But she always appeals to Rochester on exactly equal terms and when they're talking as man and woman.'

There is a theory that in Jane Eyre we have the perfect example of repressed Victorian woman's fantasy emasculation of the overbearing male (she did after all, it's proponents explain, end up with a blind, half-maimed man she had to lead by the hand). Braine dismissed this with a return to his gritty, angry Yorkshire persona.

'What a load of rubbish. Rochester was quite able to find one part of her. Theirs is a genuine, overwhelming passion- something there wasn't much of in the English novel of the 91th century. Jane didn't have any desire to make him helpless. Even blind, he had the same appeal for her because he was still so masculine.

The more feminine a woman, the more masculine there is in her and the more masculine the man, the more feminine there is in him... I'm not talking about unisex. You measure things by their opposites. What makes a man more masculine is a quality of tenderness. A cruel man is effeminate and a woman who caves in at adversity isn't a true woman.'

While admitting that Jane was a modern woman, Braine felt she still knew the best way to get her man and that this ruse was age-old. "Morals haven't changed much since Jane's time. Very often the way still to get your man is to hold out. Putting a high price on the commodity still holds the most attraction for a man."

PHYLLIS Bentley, a spry, white-haired Yorkshirewoman just turned 70, spoke affectionately of Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre's creator, as she drove me at a brisk pace around the steep hills of her native Halifax in her bright new red car.

"I was born eight miles from the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth and I have a great sympathy for the family, especially Charlotte."

With some satisfaction, Miss Bentley said that the thousands of American tourists who come to visit the Haworth parsonage where the Brontes lived tend to buy one of her Bronte biographies on the way (she has written two of them).

"Like Charlotte, I had a great difficulty in finding satisfying work," she says. "I was always eager to work for my living and at that dat it was not always easy. The social atmosphere was much against women taking degrees. But I went ahead and got one, anyway at London University, this after going to Cheltenham. Now, mercifully, most every Yorkshire girl can find a job if she wants to."

Miss Bentley is convinced that Jane Eyre would not have felt out of place working in Leeds or Halifax today. Not only was she fully modern, but she was spirited. In many ways, the Halifax authoress prefers "spirited" women to the more militant variety.

"Being a governess was about all a woman could do in Jane's day- a governess, how awful! But she wouldn't submit. When Rochester asked if she thought him handsome, she snapped out 'No, sir!'

She would have the same intensity and passion today. Even now you have to put up quite a fight to get a really top job. After all, woman's emotions haven't changed much since then. You can still fall in love in any century, you know."

She feels that today's women still long for a man like Rochester who is strong, spirit and soul.

"He would be the wishfulfilment of every spinister then and now, the hero to whom they can deliver saucy remarks to show their independent spirit. That kind of dominating man appeals particularly to the woman who's not eager to surrender. I think this is why single women are so permissive today. They are searching for someone to fulfill these very fantasies."