On reading and re-reading Jane Eyre

In 2017 I wrote a guest blog about Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë for the now closed Discovering Diamonds site (run by author Helen Hollick). In that post I discussed the impact the book had had on me. Below is an edited version of what I wrote then. It’s followed by a piece prompted by my recent re-reading of the novel.

(2017)

I can’t remember how old I was when I first read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, but I do know that I’ve re-read it many times since. When I looked at it again before I wrote this post, it had lost none of its significance for me. Jane Eyre taught me that women can be rebels, and that the reading woman can be a powerful symbol of subversion.

From the opening page you know you are in the company of a rebel female. The book opens with the child Jane reading. She’s on her own, and she relishes it. The passages of the book she is reading – Bewick’s History of British Birds – that particularly strike a chord with her are all images of solitude. She dwells on images of empty places: the Arctic, the ocean, the solitary rocks where sea-fowl live, the solitary churchyard. Humans appear in the scenes only to undergo death, the experience that all, even the most sociable, must face alone. And she is, she says, happy, reading on her own.

But a female can’t be left alone and it isn’t long before the bully, John Reed, interrupts her reading. Master Reed – he insists on the title – tells her she has no right to read his family’s books, she is to be denied access to them. He turns the book into a weapon and throws it at her, precipitating the crisis that sees her cast out of the house and sent to a boarding school at the other end of the country.

John, dull as he is, has dimly sensed that Jane’s reading makes her independent, stimulates her intelligence, puts her beyond his reach. And it’s turned her into a rebel. She knows what tyranny is from her reading: she tells him he’s like one of the Roman Emperors she has read about in Goldsmith’s History of Rome.

Jane uses her reading to assert her selfhood. Her reading represents her need and desire to be her own person, to stand alone, to be independent. She has her own reading tastes and not even bribery can turn her from them. She has judged the books of the Bible for herself: she likes Daniel and Revelations, she doesn’t like the Psalms. When she is told the story of a little boy who claims he would rather read the Psalms than be given a gingerbread nut, and who is habitually rewarded for his sly piety with two gingerbread nuts, she remarks coolly, “Psalms are not interesting”.

Books are her solace: she turns to Gulliver’s Travels in the days after John Reed’s attack. Books are a way of recognising kindred spirits: her friendship with Helen Burns at Lowood school is initiated when Jane asks the older girl, “Is your book interesting?” Books are her teachers: Helen tells her that reading the New Testament will teach her that violence does not overcome hate. Books, or at least the books Jane Eyre is interested in, are truthful. I will not, her narrative voice declares, “echo cant, or prop up humbug”.

What a breath of fresh air she is! Jane Eyre, the woman who quietly, determinedly, goes her own way. As a child she refuses the roles thrust upon her: to be the grateful orphan, to be sociable and childlike. As an adult, she casts a critical eye on the shallow, showy, selfish, grasping, ill-natured and unkind society that surrounds her. She is firm as a rock: she is never anything less than Jane Eyre, the woman who reads and thinks for herself.

Jane Eyre was the first rebel female I encountered, and she has been an influence on my reading, writing and thinking ever since.

Jane defies Mrs Reed

(2025)

On to 2025 and my latest re-reading. As I opened the book, I wondered anxiously if this was the year in which whatever attraction it had held for me had gone. Would it feel stale and flat? Would I wonder how I could ever have been so drawn to it? Would it still hold meaning for me? Would those meanings have changed; would, for example, what I wrote in 2017 be a lifeless thing, the ghost of an enthusiasm long since faded?

Worse of all, would it bore me?

I need not, as the cliché runs, have worried. I have always loved the opening:

‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.’

I love it still, for its immediacy; for the way it is from the outset unmistakably Jane’s voice, so cool, so unflinching with its vaguely mocking ‘indeed’; for the strength of the images (‘the leafless shrubbery’) – the novel’s visual power is a constant throughout, epitomised perhaps in Jane’s striking, even unsettling, drawings and paintings; and for the way it launches you straight into the setting, the story, the atmosphere. And what an atmosphere it establishes: gloom, storm, coldness, something not quite safe. I love the very rhythm of the words. ‘There was no possibility…’ I read, and back it comes, the emotions of that first, fresh, reading.

I am freshly amazed by how powerful a character she is. It strikes me that this is a novel with an absolutely female gaze – it’s all about Jane, so much so that on previous readings I’ve paid hardly any attention to Rochester or St John, except so far as Jane sees them. They don’t interest me as characters so much as her reaction to them does.

This time, though, I find myself following her gaze to its object, and looking at what she sees. I even begin to sympathise with or understand Rochester through her eyes of love – he’s disappointed, spoiled, he’s been brought up to be the entitled and imperious man he is. Because she sees all this, I see it, and he begins to make sense, though I cannot admire him. In none of my readings of the book has he been other than a bully, cruel, selfish, and deceitful.

St John is even worse, and here Jane’s vision does not sway me. It remains, though, her vision. But how I dislike St John! He too is a bully, cruel, selfish and deceitful, only in his case he dresses up his own desires as God’s will, and I loathe him for it.

I feel the power of Jane’s claims to equality with these men. When she tells St John she’ll be his curate but not his wife, it is a truly radical declaration. It’s as if she’s reclaiming the power women had in the early Christian church, when they were deacons and preachers, before patriarchy wrote them out. She does not demand equality, she asserts it.

But, of course, it’s an equality of class. She is a lady, as Rochester and St John are gentlemen, and she is equal with them because of her class. She’s essentially conservative in social relations (the lower orders are the lower orders). So it’s a troubling kind of equality, which perhaps in the end is more about equality of feeling than status.

For all that, she’s a subversive figure. She may have been shaped in her outlook and behaviour by her place and time, but her spirit is free. Jane is still to me a rebel woman, and I love her for it.

Is your book interesting?

Picture Credits

Jane defies Mrs Reed from Jane Eyre, publisher Service & Paton, 1897, British Library on Flickr; public domain

Is your book interesting? from Jane Eyre, publisher Walter Scott, 1897, British Library on Flickr; public domain