Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Notes by Michael Mason
533 pages
Published 1847
Read from July 23 to July 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Several years ago I had the misfortune of trying to read Don Quixote. Don't get me wrong, I loved the portions of the book that dealt with Quixote and Sancho Panza. But maybe a little over a third of the way through the thing, Quixote and Sancho Panza disappear off the stage, their boisterous and preposterous adventures forgotten for a passel of uninteresting paragons of Christian morality, who swap tales in between ejaculations over God's goodness and mercy. The experience put me off the classics canon for quite a while.
So it was a welcome surprise that the first two-thirds or so of Jane Eyre was thoroughly, even briskly readable. The chapters of her childhood neglect and emotional abuse resonated with me; I think that part of the book would have been a favorite and fixture of my developing sensibilities had I read it at, say, age 13. The romance with Rochester was surprisingly affecting, for all its stiffness, and the Gothic touches -- while predictable and inevitably tainted with Victorian ideas of race -- were mildly entertaining. It wasn't until the final third of the book that the dreaded expostulations on God and Providence, not to mention fortuitous bequests and surprise cousins and clairvoyant encounters, sank in and made a muck of the story's momentum and readability.
There's plenty of room to write intelligent thoughts on Jane Eyre as a primordial feminist character (or not), but I'm sure that's been done to death in undergraduate English dissertations and so on.
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