One feature of the great literary classics, apart from their similarity to a row of marble busts in an eighteenth century aristocratic country house library – marmoreal, still, and reverenced – is that one too often forgets to read them. After all, they are there and, surely, one must have read them. From time to time, however, one discovers on inspection that actually one hasn’t. Professional scholars, critics, teachers fall into this trap less readily than independent, serendipitous, general readers who are not required professionally to have read and annotated everything. As one of the latter group I can testify, shamefacedly, that it does happen. More common, however, is the experience of having read something a long time ago and assuming that it is lodged in one’s mind but, on pulling down a copy and reading it again it is like reading it for the first time. Since one brings to reading the whole weight of one’s literary experience and life experience the reader of today is not the reader of 40 years ago which is about how long it is since I read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).
Re-reading it after such a long time my first thought was that I did not remember how good it was. Surely it is one of the finest novels in the English literary canon. We know all about the Bronte legend of the sisters in their parsonage, the drunken brother, the brooding Yorkshire moors around them etc etc. But regardless of the Haworth soap opera these books deserve their fame. Some years ago, I emerged from a modestly-attended talk I had just given at the Ilkley Literature Festival on my book A Corkscrew is Most Useful: the Travellers of Empire (2008) to collide with what looked like a crowd of football spectators hurtling towards the turnstile on a Saturday afternoon. They were all going to listen to the next talk by the author of a new biography of the Brontes. We all love the Brontes and Jane Eyre is a clear reason why we should. Below is the battered spine from my collection of the first volume (1901) of Grant Richards’ World’s Classics series later taken over by Oxford University Press. Richards knew what he was doing in making Jane Eyre No 1 in the new venture.
What I had forgotten about the novel was the powerful defiance Charlotte embodied in Jane Eyre. “What passion, what fire in her!” George Eliot wrote in her journal after reading it, and this story of a young orphan finding her own way in the world and fighting against all the odds for freedom and justice and the right way to live still has one cheering her on. “Consider that eye,” marvelled Mr Rochester, “consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it defying me, with more than courage, with a stern triumph.” His sense of her being “at once so frail and so indomitable” gets to the heart of Jane Eyre’s character, its quiet strength. These and other psychological insights are acute and the monsters in this story that she engages with are not Dickensian grotesques but real people – Sarah Reed and the clergyman St John Rivers, for example – whose futile attempts to control her are conveyed with great subtlety and skill. Her dialogue with St John Rivers, the revolting pious egotist, is beautifully executed as she follows the twists and turns of his attempts to net her – but in the end, of course, she refuses to submit.
I read the novel in the Penguin classics edition which comes with a very good introduction by Q.D. Leavis which, amongst other things, shows how her spirit looks forward to D.H. Lawrence. Recommended.
Now, I am looking along my shelf and I spot The Moonstone.
Have I? Did I, many moons ago? Better find out.
Ravenously is a good word. It is totally absorbing.
I read Jane Eyre for the first time last summer and it was up there with the most entertaining books I’ve ever read. That’s not a word I would usually use to describe literature—in fact, I’m more likely to use it as a criticism—but in this case it seemed appropriate and I mean it as a compliment. My partner said she’d never seen me read a book so ravenously.