Jane Eyre is the story of a small, plain-faced, intelligent, and passionate English orphan. Jane is abused by her aunt and cousin and then attends a harsh charity school. Through it all she remains strong and determinedly refuses to allow a cruel world to crush her independence or her strength of will. A masterful story of a woman’s quest for freedom and love. Jane Eyre is partly … autobiographical, and Charlotte Bronte filled it with social criticism and sinister Gothic elements. A must read for anyone wishing to celebrate the indomitable strength of will or encourage it in their growing children.
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A classic
One I’ve owned, read many times, and watched different movie adaptations. A must-read in everyone’s lifetime.
Touching, beautifully constructed plot, description and setting.
Life has been full of tyranny and obligations for Jane eyre.Being orphaned at a young age and educated at a boarding school , pessimism and obscurities have benn constant companions in the monotonous life of hers.But fate interwines and transforms her life when she decides to take up the profession of a governess and meets Mr.Rochford.After an …
Classic worth reading
The novel Jane Eyre takes you into her historical world and plunges you into the depths of inspiration!
This is one of my favorite classic novels. I’m not entirely sure what it is about the story that I like so much, but it’s one that is close to my heart. I first read it in high school and have read it many times since. If you haven’t read it, now’s the time to pick it up.
The Brilliance audio book is excellent, the narrator did a wonderful job. She was able to give each character its own unique voice while conveying the emotion that was required. I found the book long and the last third was filled with some unbelievable coincidences. Jane leave Thornton Hall and just happens to by chance end up in the village and …
I love this book I love the plot the mystery the old fashion romance and the tragedy in it I think this book is the best of all time and I hope in future many will continue to read cause it has so much in it
I read this book a long time ago, not sure which edition but this is one I have in my bookcase. I love the unusual circumstances in the story. Very well done.
Jane Eyre is a well developed character with an unhappy life who finds happiness in the ordinary things. The story is a slow read but worth the effort.
One of my favorite classics.
Of all the romance books I’ve ever read, this one sticks out to me for some reason. Jane Eyre is an orphan who endures humiliation and ugliness from her own family members, a mean aunt and arrogant snotty cousins. She’s sent away to school and endures even more cruelty, but this time at the hands of the head school master.
Jane perseveres and …
Unlike my reviews of contemporary romance novels, I’m going to throw a few SPOILERS into this review. So, if you plan to read Jane Eyre and don’t want to see any SPOILERS, stop reading now!
The Opening
Jane Eyre has an amazing, action-packed opening that lasts for about a fifth of the way through the book. Unlike most modern novels, the opening focuses entirely on the female protagonist, and we don’t even meet Mr. Rochester until the end of the opening.
Something else that was common in Victorian novels but rare now is that this romance novel begins with the protagonist’s childhood. Not just a short prologue set when she is a child, but an entire history of her childhood from an early age.
The only contemporary romance novel I’ve seen where this happens is Burning For You` by Kaye Kennedy, which is also a great book.
The Characters
In the opening chapters, Jane is established as a sympathetic character for many reasons: she is being bullied by her cousins, she is neglected by her aunt, she is mistreated in school, and she is an orphan. More importantly, she is a sympathetic character because of her proactive personality.
She refuses to back down to bullying in the first few chapters. She offers support to Helen Burns and true friendship. Jane is a nice person who acts on what she believes to do good.
Mr. Rochester is much less sympathetic. He’s actually quite a terrible man. He’s a forty-year-old man in a position of power who is seducing an underage girl in his charge. Yes, Jane is underage. The age of consent in Victorian England was twenty-one, but Jane is only eighteen.
Not only that, but he’s a married man, and he attempts to manipulate this underage girl into an illegal marriage. He has a living wife trapped in his attic. And we know that he is generally of bad character because Adele is clearly his child from a dalliance with a Parisian lady of questionable morals.
He also badly misuses poor Blanche Ingram just to make Jane jealous. Somehow, despite all his many faults, Charlotte Brontë still gets us to like him as a Byronic hero through Jane’s viewpoint. He’s a typical bad boy character.
In fact, it makes me quite angry when I see modern film adaptations of Jane Eyre. They often make Jane about twenty-five and Rochester thirty. Not only that but in the novel Jane is plain and Rochester is downright ugly. In the films, they’re typically both attractive. The whole point of the story is that these are ORDINARY people with terrible physical and personality flaws BUT they STILL love one another.
The Plot
Jane Eyre has a fantastic and complex plot. The best thing about it is that for the first half of the novel it appears to be a traditional romance but then the whole trope is subverted at the midpoint. Everything you thought you knew is turned on its head when you discover that Rochester is already married and has his wife hidden in the attic.
An interesting factor in the plot is that it depends upon several HUGE coincidences. After the midpoint, Jane runs away in a random direction and a random distance and winds up living with her cousins, her closest living relatives, even though she doesn’t realize it at the time. And at the end of the story, she “hears a voice” from a hundred miles away that makes her go running back to Rochester.
With any other author, the suspension of disbelief would be shattered. However, Charlotte Brontë has the necessary writing skills to pull off these unusual occurrences and make them appear natural within the narrative.
The Setting
For many people, the setting in the wild moorland of Yorkshire is one of the highlights of this book. Not quite as interesting and well-developed as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but good all the same.
There is some debate as to which house Thornfield Hall is based on. It is widely believed that it describes either High Sunderland Hall in Halifax or North Lees Hall in Hathersage.
However, I have my own personal theory. For fifteen years, I lived in Thornton, a village near Bradford in Yorkshire. It is the village where all the famous (later) Brontë siblings were born and the home of Charlotte’s godmother, Elizabeth Firth. Thornton is only around five miles from Haworth where the Brontës lived and was a place they visited frequently.
Behind the chapel where the siblings were christened lies a large but hidden manor house called Thornton Hall. It is not a grand stately home. However, it is a gothic building with crenelations and surrounded by thorn trees.
During Charlotte’s lifetime, Thornton Hall was seldom used and so the furniture would often have been covered with dustsheets as depicted in the novel. It’s also only a short walk from the Bell Chapel, just like described in the book. And if you think about Thornfield and Morton from the novel, they both contain elements of the name Thornton.
The Prose
Despite what Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One’s Own, I think the narration of Jane Eyre is perfect. It is engaging and immersive. Even though Charlotte Brontë breaks a cardinal rule of novel writing and directly addresses the reader
(Reader, I married him!) this romance novel still retains the suspension of disbelief throughout.
My Opinion
Since this is my favorite classical novel, it won’t shock you when I say it deserves a rating of 5 out of 5. I’d give it 10 if I could!
It owes much to Anne Brontë’s less well-written Agnes Grey, which Charlotte read before she wrote Jane Eyre, and some argue that Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a better book. However, Jane Eyre is definitely my favorite Brontë romance novel.
My favorite book ever