But having said that, I don’t know if I’d make a habit of reading classic literature from that era. I’m a modern reader, with a modern reader’s impatience and I found the book very long. I found some of the dialogue, especially Rochester’s, long and difficult. There was one point where Rochester went on a rant and Jane tells him she doesn’t understand him. I was very glad Jane didn’t know what he was talking about because I didn’t have a clue either! Thankfully not all the dialogue was this way and some of it was great.

Hayley asked what kind of story we thought this was: a romance, a coming of age story, a gothic horror, a story of a character’s life. I would call it a romance, although it has elements of those other genres thrown in. It is a story of two people meeting, falling in love, and having to surmount huge obstacles in order to be together and get to their happy ending. In the end I think Rochester proves himself worthy of love and of Jane. When Bertha sets Thornfield on fire he not only saves all the staff, he tries to save Bertha, even though it is to his advantage for her to die. He becomes a real hero.

I learned a few things from Bronte that I will try to use in my own work. I wrote a blog called “What I Learned from Jane Eyre”. You can find it on my blog at http://janarichards.blogspot.com

Jana

Jana

I tried to absorb some of the wonderful phrases and vocabulary in the work, such as describing the rough peasant girls when they first started at the school as “heavy looking, gaping rustics”. Reminded me of some people I know :) Or how she knew that, as St. John’s wife, she would be “forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry”: hang in there, Sister.

Jane doesn’t simply go to the library, she ‘repairs’ to the library; a problem is “an insuperable impediment”; hunting for a quick comeback to a remark is “oh, for some good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response!”. Lots of food is a plenteous meal, grabbing a cookie when no one is looking becomes a privately purloined dainty.

And many of the musings went right to the heart of simple truths about life, such as “there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort”. Love softens the harsh way we look at someone: “I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp look-out. That harshness that had startled me once, was now only like keen condiments in a dish.” And the pithy “remorse is the poison of life”.

Thank you Hayley for this assignment, or I would likely never have taken the time to read Jane Eyre. I shall now repair to the boudoir to exchange contumelious epithets and some supercillious taciturnity with proud dowagers who confabulate together.

However, I doubted myself after reading your comment so I did some surfing and found “Law and Society in England 1750 -1950.” It said: “Even in the 1840s divorce was a highly unusual remedy for matrimonial breakdown and was by then coming to be attacked as a class privilege reserved for aristocrats.”

I think Bronte didn’t have Rochester divorce Bertha because her readers wouldn’t have expected it to be an option for Rochester.

I wrote a blog post called “What I learned from Jane Eyre”. I’d love if some of you could hop on over and give your opinion at my blog.

“One of the reasons for Jane Eyre’s apparent authority over her own experience….. is that… it is history rather than story.” And “…we are led to believe Jane Eyre’s good fortune, because we are led to believe her voice. It is, in its directness, ruefulness, and scarcely concealed rage, startlingly contemporary and confirms the critical insight that all works of genius are contemporaneous both with their own times and with ours.” So, is this a work of genius? Even Oates describes it as having a plot that is “…increasingly contrived and melodramatic…and, so far as “story” is concerned, the tensions of the interior dialectic sometimes lack subtlety.” It’s certainly a classic, so does that translate to “genius”, and if so, why? Her insight into human character? The scope of her sometimes brutal honesty, albeit tempered by what I consider somewhat of a “cop-out” with the (and I won’t use the adjective I had in mind so as not to give things away) ending? Or something else entirely?

As for that ending, Oates notes the “The orphan Jane is no longer “resisting all the way”; no longer, at this point, required to be Jane. The novel’s passionate energies have consumed themselves…” With that sentiment I concur. Do you?

Cheers all. I’ll look forward to reading your comments.