“Jane Eyre” (1847) is a romance novel by non-Asian writer Charlotte Bronte. Have you ever wanted to be a governess in a creepy old mansion with someone screaming in the attic in the middle of the night? Or fall in love with a rich man with a mysterious past? Then this is the book for you! It was a bestseller not only in its own time 175 years ago, but it is still in print and widely regarded as one of the 100 best novels in both the US and its native UK.
I first read it years ago when I was young and naive. The plot seemed cliched and the characters cold. I was later informed that the cliches were the genre conventions of Gothic romance novels and that the coldness was “Britsh reserve”. Oh.
I read it a second time in 2022, this year, finishing it on Valentine’s Day. It has been much improved. The cliches and coldness I took as a given: love among the reserved and secretive British. And I have since lived much more of life, some of it strangely Eyrean, and have read the Bible. Had I been familiar with the the Book of Common Prayer too, maybe it would have made even more sense. It and the Bible were part of the cultural literacy of the not-yet-post-Christian Anglosphere back then. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (1863) plays off of both.
Bronte’s view of religion and the clergy, despite being a pastor’s daughter, seems clear-eyed.
I like it way better than “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) by Jane Austen. It makes Jane Austen look like warmed-over soap opera that is more about money than love. Austen lacks the poetry and darkness of Bronte. From chapter 21 onwards, “Jane Eyre” leaves Jane Austen in the dust.
But “Jane Eyre” itself is out-Bronted by another Bronte, Charlotte’s sister Emily, in “Wuthering Heights” (1847). I read that first – it easily makes my top ten – and so my expectations for “Jane Eyre” were way too high. But I seem to like “Wuthering Heights” better than most.
“Jane Eyre” most reminds me of “Rebecca” (1938) by Daphne du Maurier, which seems to be the 1900’s answer to “Jane Eyre”.
My ranking (with the Goodreads rating in parentheses):
- Wuthering Heights (3.88)
- Jane Eyre (4.14)
- Pride and Prejudice (4.28)
- Rebecca (4.24)
All four make the list of the top 100 novels in both the US and UK. All of them are good.
Film and television adaptations: The BBC adaptation of 2011 is the best one according to my sister, a huge Austen-and-Bronte fan. It pretty much turns the book into soap opera: the plot is preserved, mostly, but not the poetry. And it is way too sunny! It is like they either did not read the book or did not go to film school. But so much of the book takes place in Jane Eyre’s head (and heart) that it is a harder book to put on film than Jane Austen’s behavioristic, dialogue-driven books.
Favourite line: “A true Janian reply!”
– Abagond, 2022.
Sources: Etsy, which had a picture of the same Signet paperback edition that I first read.
See also:
- books
- books I read in 2022
- 1851 media diet
- Transatlantic novels – those popular in both the US & UK.
- Pride and Prejudice
- Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
- the limitation to film and television adaptations:
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Abagond 
@ Abagond
Wuthering Heights is also in my top ten favorites of all time. It is not exactly cold and reserved!! That may be part of what threw you off with Jane Eyre when you were young, an unconscious expectation that Charlotte would write like Emily.
Maybe it was because of my young age when I first read Jane Eyre, but I remember then that the opening chapters about her childhood were easily the most interesting to me, especially her hardships in the Dickensian boarding school. Then I read her biography and found out that part was based on her real life, including the deaths of her two eldest sisters (represented by Helen Burns in the novel).
Also note that the two families Jane Eyre is associated with, the Reeds and the Rivers, both consist of one brother and two sisters, the same as Charlotte’s surviving siblings.
There is a substantial amount of scholarship exploring the possibility that Bertha Mason Rochester, “the mad woman in the attic,” is of mixed race:
https://victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/cho10.html
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-figure-of-bertha-mason
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Anybody of Caribbean generational background who is represented as white has to be considered as being possibly of mixed race background. Bertha Mason Rochester is described as creole right in the pages of the book. Generally, creole means mixed. So the only question is, what mix? Is it just a mix of cultures, or is it racially mixed? We are not exactly told, and given that the work is fiction, there is no definite answer beyond what it is in the text. But I believe the evidence of the text itself speaks to her being racially mixed, and perhaps a mix of more races than just the black and the white.
There is another thing in Jane Eyre that intrigued me. The harsh boarding school for disadvantaged but developable girls that Jane Eyre attended might have been deemed equivalent to the French lycee or the German gymnasium. The level of education she received could have been anywhere from the equivalent of three years of high school through a two-year associate’s degree.
Whatever it was, when she completed it, she was deemed qualified to teach elementary school. Compare that to the bloated qualifications we demand of people simply to be allowed to teach as much as undergraduate college.
Historically, people have always been deemed to qualified to teach up to their own level. But not in recent decades. That’s what happens when you try to systematize social relations. Whenever you do, you end up with some kind of apartheid. In our case – degree apartheid and a university caste system.
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Man, I hated this book when we had to read it in high school.
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