Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

My aunt saw me reading this when I was in Utah for my brother's wedding a couple weeks ago and she said, "Oh, you're reading Jane Eyre again?" She was a bit surprised when I admitted that I had never read it. This is one of those books that almost any girl who loves reading has read fairly early in her reading career. But about the time I should have been falling in love with the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin, I was going through a dark Russian literature phase, and I missed out.

But I've had Jane Eyre on my shelf for awhile, and when I was trying to see if I could enjoy Jane Austin earlier this year, and engaging in a little bit of Anglophilia in preparation for my trip to the UK, I thought I'd give Jane Eyre a try. Seven months later I remembered what I had started, and decided to make an effort to finish.

I have to admit, I had a hard time getting into the book. For the first 100 pages I felt like I was making my way through by sheer force of will for the 100 pages. It was a little too English-romantic for me, with schoolgirls dying of consumption and all that, and I couldn't see where any of it was going. But once Jane left her boarding school, I got sucked in and was no longer just trying to get through it. When I put down the book each night, I looked forward to the next time I'd be able to pick it up.

One thing I like about reading classics is that I can let down my critical guard a bit, and read some of the things that seem strange or unwieldy as a product of the time period. My critical eye is not completely dormant (like I said, schoolgirls dying of consumption didn't do it for me), but I was able to overlook a lot of the flowery language and overly dramatic elements of the book and just enjoy the story. In the end, I found that I loved the middle section, but didn't care much for 50-100 pages at the front and back ends (schoolgirls dying of consumption was counterbalanced by fires and blindness and uncanny fortuitous coincidences). That wasn't enough to turn me away. I came away with an overall positive impression.

I found Jane to be a compelling narrator, in part because she is narrating from the future and offers her commentary on what she was thinking and feeling and doing in the past. She was pretty astute in her analysis, and I found that I could relate to her very well as a character. I had some interesting thoughts about how Charlotte Bronte portrayed love and marriage and set up an ideal for what these should be, but I won't go into those here. And I wanted things to go well for Jane, and appreciated the foreknowledge that it would all end happily (this made for much easier reading than, say, Tess of the D'Urbervilles).

Overall I liked it, and I'm happy that I read it. It makes me feel a little less traitorous to my gender after my attempt at Jane Austin earlier this year.