Jane Eyre

What a fool I feel, in retrospect, for being so presumptuous as to imagine, simply from a crossover in audience, that the Brontes wrote just like Jane Austen, and therefore concluded that I would greatly dislike Jane Eyre. The difference in style could hardly be greater. Where I find Austen contrived, smug, poorly characterised and – far worse than all besides – deathly dull, Currer Bell, née Charlotte Bronte, writes with such vigour and such obvious enjoyment that Jane Eyre was an absolute joy to read.

It is clear that Bronte wrote what she wished to read, not to ridicule the tastes of others, not as social commentary, but purely for pleasure. Indeed, but for her language and the paramount position held in the plot by adult relationships, Jane Eyre could almost be an excellent children’s book – there are broad characterisations, obvious emotions and conceits, incredible coincidences, a typical suffering orphan victimised by her parent figure as protagonist, and even a little bit of magic towards the end. But the realism of the major characters, as well as the aforementioned language, put the work amongst the best in adult literature. The language was perhaps the greatest surprise – I expected functionality, with the eloquence of vocabulary typical of the period. But the way Bronte writes is so much more than that: her descriptions of nature, of physical appearances, even of buildings show a grace in prose that is deeply poetic, with comparisons that made me pause to appreciate the evocative cleverness, the striking beauty of the images she spun. Her dialogue, too, with dialects imitated, with hesitations and broken sentences, is so much more believable than I had anticipated that I wished her influence on the way speech is rendered could have been greater. Stylistically, Bronte is first-rate, and that I must admit I had not expected; it was the first of several pleasant surprises.

Much of the character of Jane Eyre seems to be derived from Charlotte herself, from autobiographical details to temperament, and it is perhaps this that makes her so believable. She has faults, not only the ones pointed out in the text (eg impulsiveness), but others that make one wonder whether Charlotte would have considered them flaws at all, such as a tendency to be overbearingly clever and patronising around those of a lower social class, despite her own admirably modern views on the subject expressed elsewhere. Jane is fascinating, both strong and vulnerable, pragmatic and rash, and always believable. Rochester, too, is perhaps the perfect romantic interest: striking, powerful, yet tortured, flawed: someone the right woman could change given the chance, something many women yearn for. He’s a manipulative, scheming sort of a man, the kind of person who makes a woman think that he loves someone else just to make her suffer, and thus prove her own desires, but that only makes him more attractive, for someone like Jane, perhaps like the reader, can change him. They’re a wonderful couple, and their relationship is fascinating.

In summary, the narrative would perhaps seem a ludicrous – childish, even, as I have alluded to previously. But the soul of this story is character interaction, and here it can hardly be faulted. It is also quite brave to begin a whole new storyline at the very crisis point of the novel, starting again with a whole new set of characters, but this secondary plot was handled well, and was just as compelling as the main storyline. Why, though, the novel closes telling of a character from this segment, however, I’ll never know. The mystery cannot detract, however, from a deeply satisfying conclusion.