This week marks 179 years since the first publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in 1847, something which will be celebrated in Great Britain with little more than a small London theatre production. The occasion may be being noted more enthusiastically in China, where the book has been newly added to the national curriculum for 14- and 15-year-olds, with the strange aim of indoctrinating schoolgirls into becoming compliant brood-mares for the demographic good of the Chinese Communist party.

The Brontë Parsonage museum has organised a special exhibition, ‘The Colonial Brontës’, trying desperately to link the sisters to the subjugation of Africa

The Brontë Parsonage museum has organised a special exhibition, ‘The Colonial Brontës’, trying desperately to link the sisters to the subjugation of Africa

As the Beijing Daily explained, ‘the innocent, budding stage of first love is a crucial period for shaping a well-rounded personality’. The model henceforth to be adopted for the nation’s schoolgirls is Jane herself. At the novel’s end, readers will recall, her ultimate husband Mr Rochester gets his eyes burned out in a fire, before Jane agrees to honour and obey him: hence, she is a model of literal blind obedience, just what the communists want. Leader, I married him.

Western commentators have derided the CCP’s actions, mocking their totalitarian and prescriptive attempt, ‘to help [children] establish a value system’ by reading a 200-year-old text and interpolating utterly irrelevant political messages into it. But are 21st-century establishment authorities here in Charlotte Brontë’s original homeland of England really any different?

Brontë Parsonage Museum, the registered charity which manages the family’s old rural rectory home, is currently pretending Jane Eyre – and all the sisters’ literary output – is not about love in the time of communism, but love in the time of colonialism. Running until January, the........

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