One last post: Jane Eyre

[lunabee34]

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this novel, and I love it even better on this reread. One of my favorite novels is Wuthering Heights, and both times I've read Jane Eyre I've been struck by the similarities I see between the sisters' writing (which isn't surprising since they spent so much time writing collaboratively about their imaginary world). Jane Eyre is so modern to me--the first person narrator, the focus on the psychology and motivation of characters, the lack of superfluous description. Dickens writes about orphans and poor people and the disadvantaged, and although I love Dickens, I never once forget that I'm reading a novel written more than a hundred years ago when I read, say, Oliver Twist. When Bronte writes about the same topics in Jane Eyre, they are biting and harrowing and feel contemporary to me in a way that many Victorian novels do not. Wuthering Heights has this modern quality about it as well. The way Jane and Rochester speak to each other--prickly and teasing and sarcastic, one zinger after another--also strikes me as a particularly modern way of writing dialogue. Love this book, love that Jane gets a happy ending, love that she finds a home and a family.



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Comments

[kore]

That's really such an amazing quality about the book -- it and Wuthering Heights don't feel dated at all. They do have this immediacy that makes them feel contemporary, or rather timeless. It's pretty amazing.

[lunabee34]

I have always said that WH is so violent and traumatic and dark that it really needs an HBO miniseries to faithfully capture. I don't think any film version has really captured it yet (despite how much I do love yummy young Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff).