Rebecca read and liked Conrad's review of Jane Eyre:

"I read Wuthering Heights when I was going through a crippling bout with severe clinical depression in my early 20s. Don't know if that was the best time to be reading such a messed up book, but that's what happened. At the time, it echoed so strongly...more I read Wuthering Heights when I was going through a crippling bout with severe clinical depression in my early 20s. Don't know if that was the best time to be reading such a messed up book, but that's what happened. At the time, it echoed so strongly in my brain that I literally couldn't bear to think about it too much - I ended up taking an incomplete grade for the class rather than finishing a four-page paper on the novel.

After listening to the Kate Bush song for the first time last week, I was telling my wife how much I loved the novel, how Emily just takes all the conventions of 19th century domestic fiction and sort of sets them on fire; how creepy Catherine is, how Heathcliff is both attractive and genuinely repellant; how subtly the novel makes way for the metaphysical towards the end; how masterful the handling of perspective is. In telling her about it, I started to want to reread it - after all, as Roland Barthes said, those who read books only once see them everywhere.

As is sometimes the case with spouses, though, Kate's hogging our nice new copy. So instead, I picked up the copy of the new Jane Eyre a friend gave her the other day, read the first couple pages, and was absolutely entranced. Can't put it down. I don't know if I'll finish it, but I hope I manage to.

My tastes in 19th century literature are completely arbitrary. I like Dickens, the Brontes and Mary Shelley but not Austen, Eliot, or James (if I'm completely honest); Browning, Keats and Coleridge but not Percy Shelley, Tennyson or Wordsworth. I don't know why. For some reason, the Brontes just seem to compel me to keep reading in the same way that Jane Austen makes me want to put the book down and take a nap.(less) "