My reading week. To Oct 5th.
Jane Eyre has ruined me. I finished it a week ago and casually thought I would just move on to the next cab off my TBR rank, Middlemarch, straight after. What a fool.
Not only can I not get Jane Eyre, the book, out of my mind, I also can’t get Jane Eyre the woman out of my mind. I don’t think I have ever fallen in love with a character from a book before, apart from maybe Amy from Little Dorrit, but that was just a passing crush.
Jane is feisty and takes no shit. In an age when women were anything but feisty. Described as “plain” throughout the book, and told so often by other characters, she is fully aware of what she is and confident in her own choices. What’s not to love about that.
It helps that we are drawn to her early on by the horrible treatment she receives at the hands of her detestable aunt and cousins. Fifty pages in and I was ready to fight all the way for her.
It might be almost five hundred pages long but I urge you, whatever your gender or age to read this book. The writing is absolute gold standard and there were many occasions when I had to stop and re-read a passage or sentence, simply because it had such an impact on me.
The scene where Rochester tells Jane that it is her he intends to make his bride, sitting in the dusk of a mid summer evening, along the laurel walk, all stay with me for a long time. And I’m not normally one for the romantic stuff, well maybe just a little.
So I reluctantly got to the end, with my mind full of Jane and her experiences, and tried to move on to Middlemarch, often described as one of the great English novels – possible even the greatest. But I couldn’t get “in to it” because my thoughts remained firmly with Ms Eyre.
I pushed on and am now a few hundred pages in and, whilst I wouldn’t say I love it, and I’m not fully immersed, I am keen to find out what happens to the various characters. More to come on this next week.
But for now, I’ll just go and daydream about Jane for a while ….
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