Burnt Pudding in Thornfield: Brontë, Freud, and the Psychology of Limerence

By Orly Miller

I have been reading Storms in Her Head alongside a reread of Jane Eyre, the way you sometimes read two things at once intuitively and only later understand why they belong together. Storms in Her Head is a collection of essays by psychoanalysts and cultural theorists revisiting the women in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. I had been moving through the material slowly when something struck me.

A woman in Vienna, 1892, cannot stop smelling burnt pudding. There is no pudding. There has not been pudding for some time. But the smell persists, shadowing her through rooms, through meals, through the ordinary hours of a day. She has lost her sense of smell entirely, except for this one phantom hallucination. Her name is Miss Lucy R. She is thirty years old, English, working as a governess in the household of a wealthy widower. She is in love with him. She has not told anyone this. When Freud eventually traces the hallucination back to its source, he finds a single afternoon. The children had been playing. Something had burnt on the stove. A guest had casually suggested that Lucy might one day replace the late wife. Her employer’s response was cold, distancing and certain. And in that moment something became clear to Lucy: her feeling had nowhere to go. It was not wanted. Her her mind put it in the smell. Kept it there. Sealed it.

I read this and had the strange sensation of having read it before. Forty-eight years earlier, Charlotte Brontë had written an eerily similar tale. Jane Eyre was published in 1847. Freud was born in 1856. Studies on Hysteria would not appear until 1895. Brontë was not borrowing from psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis did not exist yet. And yet, without clinical language, without theories of repression or the unconscious, she reached almost the exact same psychological insight. Literature did not mimic psychological theory. Literature intuited it.

What both Brontë and Freud were circling, without yet having the language, was a certain kind of intense romantic fixation. In my book Limerence: The Psychopathology of Loving Too Much (Routledge, 2025), I define limerence as an acute, disruptive and enduring state of intense longing for a specific person that is characterized by intrusive and obsessive thoughts, fantasies, emotional volatility, and a powerful desire for emotional reciprocation. I propose that limerence cannot be fully understood through existing diagnostic criteria. Rather, it requires the kind of attention that gothic fiction, poetry and art has always paid to this kind of intense and uncontained desire that has nowhere permissible to go.

The likeness is precise. Both Jane Eyre and Miss Lucy R. are young, English governesses living inside wealthy households that do not see them as equals. Both fall deeply in love with the powerful men who employ them. And both understand that admitting this love threatens not only their dignity, but their survival. They become hypervigilant students of hierarchy. Every gesture matters. Every fluctuation in warmth matters. Every small kindness becomes charged with impossible meaning. This is the phenomenology of limerence: the intrusive preoccupation, the acute sensitivity to ambiguous signals, the emotional life organised entirely around one, usually unavailable person.

The men at the centre of both stories are emotionally unavailable in remarkably similar ways. Rochester manufactures emotional distance before Jane can truly reach him, avoidance disguised as seduction. Miss Lucy R.’s employer allows a warmth intimate enough to sustain hope, never enough to resolve it.

Both stories are fundamentally about what happens when desire has nowhere permissible to go. Both women suffer under the pressure of it, though differently, and they resolve it differently too. Jane ultimately transcends the limerent state through discipline. She retreats back to hard cold reality until the facts on the ground change enough for the love to become real: reciprocated, grounded, and stable. Lucy R. does not. She remains sealed inside it, the burnt pudding her only monument. The novel shows what the clinical case cannot: that the arc from fixation toward something more enduring is possible, but it requires the hidden thing to be named and integrated.

Lucy can not hold the reality of her unrequited love. Her mind cannot tolerate the full weight of what she knows, so it performs a kind of psychic surgery, sealing the feeling inside sensory experience. The burnt pudding becomes the vault. Freud would classify this as hysteria; we might now place it near conversion disorder. What matters is the mechanism: consciousness refuses the knowledge, and the body agrees to hold it instead.

Jane moves differently. Rather than locking the repression inward, Brontë embeds it into the structure of the novel itself. Bertha Mason is locked in the attic as the embodiment of everything Jane cannot consciously permit herself to feel: rage, erotic hunger, the desire to burn the whole thing down. When Bertha tears Jane’s wedding veil in the night, she is not simply a threat, she is a visitation. She is Jane’s disowned interior returning through the walls of the house. One woman stores forbidden feeling in the body. The other stores it in narrative structure. The repression is identical. The hiding place is different.

And then there is the fire. In Freud’s study, the trauma anchors itself to the scent of something burning. In Brontë’s novel, all the repressed tension eventually erupts physically. Thornfield Hall burns to the ground. In both stories, fire marks the point where containment fails. The buried thing refuses the burial.

Brontë reached these conclusions through pure observation; no diagnostic framework, no clinical terminology. She only had intuition. And her own suffering. Years before writing Jane Eyre, she fell painfully in love with Constantin Héger, her married professor in Brussels. The surviving letters are almost unbearable to read, intensely intelligent, intensely restrained, full of emotional starvation. Jane’s inner torment did not emerge from abstraction. It emerged from lived experience metabolized into fiction.

The parallel has been noted in the feminist psychoanalytic conversation, including in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, but it tends to get absorbed into larger arguments. It doesn’t quite get followed all the way down. Perhaps because the implication is uncomfortable. It is not Freud explaining Brontë. It is Brontë explaining Freud.

If a novelist working from intuition and private longing could chart the landscape of emotional fixation before psychoanalysis had a name for it, then literature is doing something stranger and more serious than we usually admit. Not entertainment. Not even art, exactly, in the decorative sense. Something closer to what Brontë herself was doing in Brussels, when she tried to find words for the feeling that had nowhere to go. She found them. She put them in a novel. And fifty years later, a woman in Vienna walked into Freud’s clinic smelling burnt pudding, and everything Brontë had written came true.

Orly Miller is a registered psychologist and the author of Limerence: The Psychopathology of Loving Too Much (Routledge, 2025). She works with individuals and couples online worldwide at orlymillerpsychology.com

Limerence

What happens when longing takes hold and won’t let go? When the need for connection becomes obsession, and fantasy begins to blur with reality?

This book explores limerence, a complex and often misunderstood psychological state marked by intrusive thoughts, emotional dependency, and an intense longing for reciprocation. What begins as attraction can quickly spiral into fixation, projection, and the gradual unravelling of the self.

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