Brontë’s novel reveals a whirlwind of ideas on religion and gender – but can we honestly apply a 21st-century mindset to an 18th-century gothic classic?
It’s daunting to write about Jane Eyre 200 years after Charlotte Brontë’s birth. It’s not just that so many people have read and loved (and, yes, also hated) this book. It’s also the difficulty of understanding that Jane’s intimate, confiding voice may not speak to us as directly as we may think.
Among Brontë’s many talents is an ability to make you feel that you are seeing the world just as her narrator does. There’s the cosy way she draws us into the story with that direct address to “you”, the “reader” whom she invites constantly to see what she sees. We fancy we are also seeing a room in the George Inn at Millcote, visible to us “by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling”, straining to see the exact same scene under the same flickering light as Jane. But it isn’t just what Jane sees that matters: Brontë also takes us deep into her head and, seemingly, her soul. Even when she says, “Gentle reader, you may never feel what I then felt!” we think otherwise. Her “stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears” seem real, her “agonised prayers” honestly accounted, her “dread” clear and comprehensible.
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