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While I’m sure you’ve all heard of this book, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte follows the life of, you guessed it, Jane Eyre. From her life as practically a stranger in her Auntie’s house to after she’s left an orphan through to the next 10 or so years of her life. This bildungsroman centres itself on our heroine Jane who is trying to make sure that she walks her own life path and centres herself, her morals and God on whichever path she takes. Through the ups and downs of the story, the reader is always kept in close proximity to Jane’s thoughts and feelings, meaning the readers become extremely well acquainted with Jane by the end of the novel.
Even though by the 21st century, morality and religious themes are part and parcel of modern literature, Brönte revolutionised this in the 19th century. Jane is the embodiment of female Christian teaching in England at the time, constantly aligning her intense feelings to her Christian values and ensuring they exist on conjunction with each other.
This exploration of faith in Jane is probably my favourite aspect of the whole novel, most likely because of how Jane is written overall. She is the most well written character in the whole book and it is clear that Brönte might even share some relatability to Eyre because of this really deep and spiritual portrayal of the protagonist. Though my later criticism will be that none of the characters are written to the same standard as Jane, the beauty of the whole book is how inevitably, you will fall in love with Jane.
Onto the criticisms of the book, I thought it dragged on too much. The book could have gone from 532 pages to around 400 easily. Descriptions during this time period was the focus, and even though Brönte introduced new styles of writing, the overall descriptive window and garden scenes did feel slightly repetitive and unnecessary. After two examples and 6 pages of intense descriptive writing, it really doesn’t need to carry on – but that’s classical literature for you.
Additionally, the book is a romance novel, yet I hated how the romance was written and how flaky it was. The two main love interests in the book are both with men who are badly written, and the love between the characters is barely explored until one day Jane says, “I love him, I’m going to marry him”, which feels like quite the jump considering the readers are experiencing every thought of Jane. The second love interest seems extremely rushed and out of the blue, as if Brönte had thought the ending through but because she realised she was already on page 500 and hadn’t got to where she wanted the story to end, she rushed the whole conclusion just so she could have the ending exactly like she wanted.
Overall, while I see its cultural significance, and I have endless praise for Charlotte Brönte (and her sisters who were also authors) for writing this book at a time when women in the West were second class citizens, the book just didn’t hit the exact spot I wanted it to.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐/5