Class, hunger and a ‘skinny’ Jane Eyre

Sarah Moss, discussing the need for white literary heroines to be thin, asserts that “Jane Eyre, invited to join dinner parties at Thornfield, skulks in corners black-clad and skinny” (‘Hunger numbed my shame and humiliation’, 24 August). Not so. Jane is not invited to those dinners, as she is the governess. She wears black as an indication of her class status, and has to keep out of the way. Starved as a child in an orphanage, she is indeed “little”, as Charlotte Brontë puts it, but is able to recognise her appetite, nipping down the back stairs at Thornfield to forage in the larder for supper for herself and her charge, returning with “a cold chicken, a roll of bread, some tarts”. Michèle RobertsLondon