Books I Probably Should Have Read as an English Literature Graduate, But Am Reading Now: Jane Eyre

There are certain books an English Literature graduate is supposed to have read.  We are meant to emerge from university clutching a heavily annotated copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, muttering darkly about Miltonic echoes, and able to identify a governess novel at fifty paces.

Somehow, I have reached this point in my life having never read Jane Eyre.  I’ve seen it on stage - where the actor playing the dog stole the show.  I feel I have seen bits of it on TV… but I have not read it.  I know.  I can hear the faint thud of Victorianists fainting onto chaise longues across the country.

Jane Eyre, in the garden

This is the first in an occasional series I am calling: Books I Should Have Read as an English Literature Graduate, But Am Reading Now. 

I am about a third of the way through Jane Eyre, and the verdict so far is: yes, it is absolutely worth reading.  In fact, it is far sharper, funnier and stranger than the cultural fog around it sometimes suggests. I had expected moors, suffering, repression, possibly a man standing in a corridor being emotionally unavailable.  I had not quite expected to like Jane herself.  She is watchful, morally exacting and, when required, gloriously fierce.

Her childhood at Gateshead is brutal, but it is also darkly comic in places.  The Reed household has the moral atmosphere of a damp pantry.  John Reed is a walking argument for educational reform.  Mrs Reed has the emotional range of a mounted hunting trophy.  Jane, to her credit, does not respond by becoming saintly and serene, like the rather less fun Helen Burns (who doesn’t).  She sees injustice with terrifying clarity.

Then comes Lowood, where things become more obviously grim.  I did, admittedly, sense fairly early on that Helen Burns was not long for this world.  However, Jane’s friendship with Helen is moving because it gives us an alternative model of strength.  Brontë places two forms of moral resistance beside each other and asks us to consider them: Jane’s fire and Helen’s quiet transcendence.

This is where the novel becomes especially rich for exam students - and I am yet to meet Mr Rochester, or indeed anyone in an attic.  Jane Eyre is not just a story  about a girl escaping cruelty and finding love.  It is a novel about voice, power and selfhood. Brontë uses Jane’s first-person narration to give authority to someone who, in her society, should have very little.  Her voice does not merely recount events; it judges them and exposes the hypocrisy of her contemporary society.  When paired with a novel such as A Thousand Splendid Suns, this hypocrisy does not feel so very far away in time.  

Jane is furious and funny and principled.  She is not always right, but she is always vividly thinking. Frankly, for a book I should apparently have read decades ago, that is not a bad start.  Now, she is off to Thornfield Hall, so I must go and read some more (in my hammock).