From the Bookshelf of Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)…

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

Start date: August 1, 2024

Finish date: August 31, 2024

Why we're reading this: Old School Classics Group Read August 2024

Revisit the Shelf Group Read April 2021

Revisit the Shelf Group …more
[close] Old School Classics Group Read August 2024

Revisit the Shelf Group Read April 2021

Revisit the Shelf Group Read, July 2016
Previous Group Reads:
-Revisit the Shelf Group Read, June 2013
- Old School Classic, February 2012

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Dec 09, 2010 Chinook rated it liked it

Shelves: 1-kindle, 1001, 500-women

What to say. Surprisingly, the random three stars I gave this based on not much recollection of it when when I joined Goodreads is where I’ve settled with it after this reread.

Back when I was 12 or 13, I read this and Wuthering Heights. I don’t really have any recollection of either of them from that read. I’m fairly certain my second read of this happened between my excavation in England and starting my university exchange year in Edinburgh, when I was travelling around Europe or maybe my trip What to say. Surprisingly, the random three stars I gave this based on not much recollection of it when when I joined Goodreads is where I’ve settled with it after this reread.

Back when I was 12 or 13, I read this and Wuthering Heights. I don’t really have any recollection of either of them from that read. I’m fairly certain my second read of this happened between my excavation in England and starting my university exchange year in Edinburgh, when I was travelling around Europe or maybe my trip to Italy when I was working in Scotland. Either way, I reread Jane Eyre and tried by failed to reread Wuthering Heights.

Now I’ve reread both. I like this one a lot more than Wuthering Heights, which to me read as a series of really truly terrible parenting decisions rather than a love story. Jane Eyre comes closer to a love story and is considerably more interesting, but when Wyatt accused me of listening to the audiobook at night in bed specifically to put him to sleep, I laughed because it had a lot of truth. This wasn’t a slog, not at all, but it was really wordy. A half hour of the audiobook could pass and it would feel to me that Jane had just come up with twenty ways to say the exact same thing. That sort of rumination over people and actions is pretty true to life, but sometimes it did drag for me.

People in reviews talk a lot about Jane as such a strong and independent character, sometimes with a for her time comment tacked on. And I do see that, I do. But I also see her as really fundamentally acting bizarrely with her abusers. Her need to be kind to her aunt at her deathbed was hard enough to take, but listening to St John trying to force Jane to agree to marry him, using every trick in the emotionally abusive husband handbook and then listening to her try a million different ways to act like he’s a good guy anyway and keeping in touch with him after... I dunno, guys. Her strength and independence just doesn’t strike me as all that straightforward.

Rochester and Jane are a surprisingly satisfying couple, which is such a surprise because it’s like Bronte was wondering one day what it would be like if Bluebeard just locked the wives up instead of killing them and then felt bad about it later. And yet, the repartee between them was pretty electric and awesome and so I was happy enough to see them together in the end.

I wish we got more of Bertha. She gets so little time in the story and we never get any window into her story. I’m glad I’ve got Wide Sargasso Sea waiting for me, because Bertha is wasted in this novel. It’s almost like any random impediment would have sufficed to send Jane off to meet up with her family and gain the fortune that puts her on equal footing with Rochester. I fee like Bronte missed a huge opportunity here - and after spending so much time on all that schooling preamble and Helen (I didn’t like her at all), she suddenly has a wife imprisoned in an attic and we get like five paragraphs??? I exaggerate, but for real, Emily. You dropped that ball hard. ...more

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