Jane Eyre

⚖The case for it

Locked in the room where her uncle died, a ten-year-old girl sees something and screams, and the book has declared both its gothic register and its heroine's refusal before she reaches her teens. Jane's insistence that she has as much soul and heart as anyone, poor and plain as she is, is why readers describe the romance as parity rather than rescue: "felt so real and I can believe in their relationship." The Lowood chapters set Brocklehurst's preached austerity against his own family's finery, the sharpest social criticism Bronte wrote. What makes it intimate is the address, since "Jane talks to the reader confiding her innermost thoughts and passions." One reader calls the prose "a rich meal, full of excellent diction."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Rochester tests Jane by feigning interest in another woman to needle her into confessions, which reads now as manipulation dressed as passion: "the least lovely romantic love interest ever," one reader says, and another asks, "Not much of a prize, is he?" His condescending pet names and his habit of disparaging former lovers to her do not help. Bertha Mason is kept upstairs and kept a symbol, her Creole background folded into the book's account of her madness. The back third belongs to St. John Rivers and his cold campaign to redirect Jane's life, the section where readers report stalling. Then a late turn resolves her circumstances at a stroke, luck arriving where the story should have earned something.

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings